


Six of One

by Vehemently



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-31
Updated: 2007-03-30
Packaged: 2017-10-21 05:23:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 62,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/221396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vehemently/pseuds/Vehemently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What is it: A transcontinental odyssey. A domestic melodrama. Something very confusing.<br/>Tagline: "I'm looking for somebody," said Sam. "Somebody named Sam Winchester?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. My Wayward Son

Sam Winchester came home, after two years and five months, to a place he didn't know. It was a coastal city in southern California, part of the megalopolis of Los Angeles, and he pulled off the freeway to find an old-fashioned phone booth and look himself up in the white pages. There was no listing for him, or for his brother.

So he drove around for a while, just getting the feel for the area, found the main drag and which diners the cops hung out in and counted the auto-body shops next to the offramps. He found a lunch counter and had himself a sandwich and looked out through the plate-glass windows at the midday sun and the ordinary people in it. He was very tired.

Finally he screwed up his courage and dug up out of the trunk the old broken muffler that had fallen off about four hundred miles ago, that he had managed to salvage but couldn't figure out how to reattach. It was just for show, something to hold in his hands and refer to, while he asked around. A prop, to help him play the role. Sam had spent his whole life blending in.

"Hey," he said, walking in to the Gulf station on the corner. "I'm, uh, I'm looking for a mechanic? I met him a couple years ago, he's got some expertise in classic hot-rods. I'm pretty sure he works in this town. Name's Sam Winchester?"

The attendant eyeballed him up and down and Sam wondered how bad he really looked. "Don't think so," said the man.

"His baby was this black four-door, a sixty-seven Impala. I bet he showed around pictures."

"Oh wait," said the attendant. He roped the air-pressure machine hose back towards its hanging loops while he thought. "Yeah, I met that guy, at the big show in Irvine. Forgot his name, but, the car -- that was choice. Him and his brother did it, he said. He works with Alvin, Classic Restorations, up by the freeway."

Sam chuckled. "Everybody remembers the car." He thanked the man and walked away, back the six blocks to where he had parked that selfsame Impala. It was quite a bit the worse for wear, after this long without maintenance, and not altogether black any longer, what with the mud. But that could all be fixed.

The freeway wasn't hard to find, and not far shy of it was a neat, graveled yard in front of a building emblazoned _Classic Restorations_ in shiny red and white, like something escaped from 1956 in mint condition. There were ten or twelve cars parked in front, in a gleaming array: two early Mustangs, a GTO, a Chevelle, and last on the row one of those big land-boat Cadillacs from when they were intimidating, white and immaculate in the sun. The building was gray steel, with no windows, just the open bay doors and the cars inside and the faint tinkling of music somewhere. Sam drove past in a terror and circled back around again. He parked in front of a convenience store out of sight, got out, and girded himself with the broken muffler again before steeling himself for the walk.

He kicked up bits of gravel as he wandered into the yard, and they skittered away, nervous-like. He hadn't washed in a while, and hadn't slept in a while either, and in the bright sun he was starting to feel like a burger on a grill. He came up with cover stories one after another, and discarded each one as obvious nonsense. No whopper could outdo the truth.

Sam stuck his head in the door he had guessed was the office, and saw a big gray desk covered with invoices, modern computer, catalogs in slumping rows on the shelves and framed photos of muscle cars past on the walls. But no people. A radio sitting on the floor of the doorway faced out into the first bay, playing Pearl Jam. There was a big low clank out there, as if someone had put down a wrench. Somebody was there, of course, working like normal people do.

With the noise to hide him, Sam could snoop pretty far without being noticed. It was an orderly place, with chrome pieces hung on the walls of the garage and set carefully in rows on the shelves. There was a man in the back, washing grease off his hands with a green bar of soap in an industrial sink; he talked over his shoulder to someone else, words lost in the radio. Someone else talked back low, and Sam came fully into the bay to see. The man at the sink was fat, bearded; he reminded Sam of old Bobby in his wrecking yard. The second man was on his back on a roller, under a car, one knee bent and the other straight as if the knee were stiff. The feet were in boots, black work boots, scuffed up like they'd been to hell and back again, and they very nearly had. They looked like the shoes of a person who only owned one pair of shoes.

His sweaty hands took grit off the steel of the muffler he still held -- road dirt, grease, something. The two people hadn't seen him; until he made himself known he could observe them, hold off on making a scene. He wasn't particularly in the way or in anybody's line of vision; for all his size, he had learned how to lurk. He stayed where he was while two songs went by on the radio, just listening to the noise of the two men talking, unable to parse any of the words. Just watching and knowing and waiting, half-wondering whether to just disappear and never come back.

And then his decision was made for him, as the fat man -- had to be Alvin -- turned to put away some tool and looked up. Sam put on his brave face and walked in to meet the guy, leading with a handshake. "Hi, um, I'm trying to track down a mechanic," he said. The music was loud in his ears and he didn't know whether Alvin could hear him. He stood there awkward while the man looked him over, head cocked. Sam schooled himself and didn't glance at the roller under the car.

"Somebody told me he works here. His name is Sam?"

Alvin lifted up one side of his face in a grin, "Sammy!" he shouted, and that was something anybody could hear over the music. "Hey Sammy, got a visitor!"

Sam breathed in and out. "He worked on my car once, a long time ago," he explained, but Alvin was moving back, giving him room, and he wasn't paying attention any more. The roller came out from under the car and a man was on it, looking up distractedly, his brains still deep inside the car.

"Oh," said the man, sitting up. He was wearing a coverall, plain blue-gray, sleeves folded back to the elbow. The man filling the coverall was powerful, muscular, not much bigger than he used to be but with the look of someone capable in a fight. He stood up, hopping a little to find his balance, and put his hand on the car he'd been working on.

Sam didn't know what to do. He held his camouflage muffler in front of him, just looking and looking and trying to hold himself together, and then he dropped the damn thing and they fell into each other's arms with a great clap and grab and the muffler went clang on the concrete floor. Sam stuck his nose into the guy's shoulder and inhaled that sweat-smell that said _family_. They hung off each other for a long time. "Man," he said, not trusting himself, "Oh man, I --"

"Alvin, this is my brother Dean," said Dean, swinging around to face the fat man without giving up his grip on Sam's back. "You probably guessed that."

"Uh, hi," said Sam, not feigning his shyness. "Dean Winchester."

Alvin brought up both sides of his face this time, and it looked like a proper smile. "I seen you before. In the pictures." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to a section of the wall that was nothing but pictures: beautiful cars, occasionally with people in front of them. "You still got the Impala?"

Sam laughed, and Dean laughed beside him. "I parked it down the street. It could stand some work, though. It's been through a lot." Sam bent and picked up the muffler, held it stupidly in his hands again.

Dean kept up appearances smoothly, squeezing the back of Sam's neck (transferring grease thereto, Sam could feel it) and grinning at Alvin. "Hey, what do you say I knock off early today, man?" Alvin just chuckled and waved them off.

Sam let himself be manhandled, felt the relief of someone else in control. He followed Dean around, watched him wash his hands and take off his coverall and stuff it in a locker in the back. Dean moistened a cloth and scrubbed at the grease on Sam's neck, who squirmed while warm drops of water ran one by one down his back. It was warm, well into spring; Dean didn't have a jacket with him. He had a lunch box and a key ring and a brass pendant he wore on a thong around his neck. He pulled out a watch and something that looked suspiciously like a gold wedding ring and put them both on, and then he was ready.

"I'm driving," he said, and the delight in his face was worth everything, all of it, Sam was about to burst into tears in the back of a mechanic's shop just to see that face. "Assface," Dean added, and Sam got ahold of himself.

"Bitch," Sam muttered. He hunted in his pockets and surrendered the keys.

"See you tomorrow, Alvin," Dean called, and they kicked away at stray pebbles on their way out of the yard.

Sam did not bother to control himself when he brought Dean around the corner and the Impala lay there in a parking space. He grinned like a madman as Dean paced around her, clucking at the marks on her hood and her roof, noting the one broken headlight and the gigantic dent in the back fender and how the muffler currently attached to the car belonged to something twenty years too young. They slung themselves into the front seat as of old and Sam felt like a conquering hero, dazed, triumphant. Beside him, Dean sighed and relaxed into the leather, and cocked his head at the hitch in her starter, and groaned empathetically as she found first gear. Sam's face hurt from all the grinning.

"You eat?" asked Dean. Sam shrugged. He had no appointments but this one.


	2. World of Pain

Sam Winchester wakes up in a world of hurt. That's all he knows, really: his name and a world of hurt. His eyes do the little fireworks thing when he blinks at the ceiling, tears streaming, the corona of pain radiating down from the top of his head. He can hardly move, his skin weighs so much. There's a dull throb somewhere out far away, maybe in his toes, he's not sure.

It's a white drop-ceiling, with a couple of cobwebs, high but not so high as a school gym. It's a hospital, of course. He's in a hospital room. He's been in this kind of room too much. Dad died in a room like this one.

It's day, and there's a window someplace, sending long shadows his way. He's probably sharing a room: that means no coma. His teeth ache in his jaw -- they're all there. His breath feels skunky in his mouth. His lips are dry. This sucks a whole lot.

Long yellow hair looms over him -- oh. It's a person. It's a person who knows him and he should know. "Hey," she says, and he obviously doesn't have his poker face on because she follows up with, "It's me, Jo." She's got slender fingers and no nail polish. Long-faced, she is icy, but then she smiles and her cheeks plump up like apples and he likes her. She feeds him ice chips, one by one. "You got beat up. Yesterday. You're in the hospital."

He lies blinking and thinking, his head like a churchbell. "Oh. Dean okay?"

The look on Jo's face is terrifying: confusion, pity, fear. Every muscle he can actually feel is galvanized against the possibility. "Yeah," she says at last. "Not a scratch." He feels her skin against his forehead, like checking for a temperature is what you're supposed to do for a guy who's had the tar whaled out of him. "He'll be right back, he said."

Dean isn't here. Where would Dean go? Sam moves his hands vaguely around on the mattress, thinking he'll just sit up and stand up and head on out of here and find his brother. Two hands on his chest hold him down.

"Stop," says Jo. "You broke your leg. You're not going anywhere." He gazes up at her and recognizes that implacable stare. Oh, of course -- it starts coming back to him and Sam remembers that she's in the know about the whole monsters and beasties thing.

He lets her push him back into the pillow. "We were hunting?"

Jo snorts. "Not like you all tell me everything you do." She pauses, relents. "I expect so."

"Where'd he go?"

That look again: like she wants to ask him something but the answer is going to be bad. "Something with the cover story. You were already in the hospital when he called me. I drove up here last night, all damn night long." Sam just stares. He has no idea where he is. "This is Pensacola. I was down in Gainesville, so."

There isn't time to ask what they're doing in Pensacola before Dean sweeps into the room, in control and in a bad mood. "Why'nt you call me when he woke up?" he demands, while handing Jo a cup of coffee.

She shrugs, annoyed. "Just a second ago. I been trying to stop him climbing out of bed and chasing after you on a bloody stump."

Dean blinks at her like he's surprised, but not for long. She backs away from the bed, shy, leaving cold spots on Sam's chest where her hands had been. Dean looms over, bigger than he's ever seemed. He has furrowed brows and pursed lips like he's trying to fix something he shouldn't have broken. Sam has never noticed the lines next to his mouth before. "How are you feeling, Sam?"

"Like shit," says Sam. "Jo said I broke my leg."

"Yeah, you did," and the smile on Dean's face is weak, a little guarded, a lot relieved. "And got a concussion and a pair of broken ribs."

"And you didn't get a scratch."

That gets a little nervous laugh from Dean. "But for a good cause. What do you remember?"

Sam has to think that one over. "Not a fucking thing, man. What'd we do?"

Dean winds himself up, like he's got a speech prepared. But all he says is: "Long story. The short version is, you're free of the dude with the yellow eyes. He was trying to take you, and you threw yourself down a flight of stairs instead."

"That's good?" asks Sam dully. Dean is still, like he made a face and it got stuck that way. Sam has no idea what he is thinking.

"Very good." Dean's voice is soothing, thick, like cream in coffee. "You're safe now. We're safe now. You just have to get well."

He glances down Sam's body, at the broken leg or something else. "The doctor wants to operate on your knee in a couple of days. I did some research -- I think you're getting pins in there."

"Like Wolverine. Cool." Sam tries to laugh, but his ribs are sore so he stops. He looks over at the wall and there's Jo, listening to every word, pretending she's invisible, drawing that curtain of blonde over her face like she thinks she's ugly. She is definitely not ugly, and not all that invisible, either. Sam doesn't know why she's here. He doesn't remember why there's bad blood between them, but he thinks it's something he must have done. He opens his mouth to ask Dean, _Why are you making her watch this?_ , but he finds himself biting that back. Instead he asks, "Can I have some of that coffee?"

Dean gives him a Very Sincere Face and says, "I'll ask the doctor if it's okay."

***

Sam swung the Impala out of the hospital parking lot, on his way over to see Shaniece. It was late afternoon, drawing on toward sunset this late in the fall. The sky looked like the inside of a gigantic pink grapefruit, far as the eye could see. That was Florida for you.

He caught himself tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel ("Don't Stop Believing," of all things) and flipped the radio to something gratingly country. He sat in the car on the hot roadbed and nodded at the palm trees on the traffic islands that nodded back at him. The Impala was enormous with only one person in it.

Shaniece lived in a single-story block of apartments, concrete and painted some hideous pastel color. The five-pointed circle-design hanging from her door could have been a simple geometric oddity, if you didn't know anything about magic symbolism.

"You look okay," she told Sam, as she let him in. She was curvy, sturdily built, with warm brown skin and braids to her waist. She wore another ward around her neck, disguised in a riot of cowries and clinking painted chaff-beads. Sam couldn't have counted her necklaces if he tried. Even in gray sweats, she wore her jewelry, and a couple of cowries tied into her hair.

"I'm fine," he said absently, then, looking around, "You stash your mom someplace safe?"

"Safe enough," she said, and lowered her head, frowning. Sam felt hot bands around his chest as if he were shackled and fighting himself loose. He shrugged, awkward, and reached out a hand to her.

Through a sudden lump in his throat, he mumbled, "I didn't thank you. If you hadn't showed up, I don't know what --"

She turned to him, beads tapping her rhythm, as near to tears herself as he was afraid he was. They stood facing each other for a moment, man and woman, near-total strangers, and smiled at each other shyly, gulping. But she was a tidy person, and was quickly on to other things. She pushed her braids back off her shoulders and sat. "What are you going to tell your brother?"

"Nothing," he said, sitting to match her. His knees towered over the coffee table; it was an apartment geared towards two small women. Sam leapt in: "I mean, just enough to keep him out of it."

She tapped at a big, whorled glass bead that hung on her chest. "He didn't question you?"

"He's still pretty messed up. I can work on him again tomorrow."

"Okay," said Shaniece, and looked around the room. Sam looked with her, noted how the blood had been scrubbed off the wall and the carpet pulled up. The indentation in the wallboard would need to be patched, of course, but it looked like a home again, not like a battlefield. "I was thinking about moving away," came Shaniece's voice, breaking in on Sam's assessment. "Or, I don't know, he could be anywhere. I might never leave the house again."

"Doesn't matter," Sam contradicted, and watched that controlled fear creep out from under her mastery. "You stay here, and he finds your dreams. I travel everywhere, and he comes to me -- maybe, I guess every three or four months? Wherever you are, it's like we've all got radio collars."

"Marked," she said, and allowed her features to crumple. "Damnation."

Sam wasn't sure whether that was a swear word or a prediction. He said nothing.

She sat there looking at him, at his long bones all folded up on her little furniture, and how carefully he wasn't knocking over anything off the coffee table, and after a minute of that helpless silence, she waved one hand as if sweeping her fear and her horror away. Sam watched that hand, mesmerized: the dark back of it one way, and then the paler palm the other way, like a flag in the wind, a signal. "Well, anyway," she said, and gave him a wry smile. "So what's your magic?"

"Visions of the future. Well, usually, the futures of people like us. And one time I moved a sideboard without touching it," he added. "Just that once, though. It was an emergency."

"Two for the price of one," she mused. "Well, you've seen my superpower. That and the dreams. Should we get started?"

She stood, and he stood with her. Sam towered over her, but it was she who led the way and the conversation. "Not everybody gets the dreams," he warned her. "I don't think Andy ever did, or maybe he's just such a flake he can ignore them. I never got them at all, not like what you have."

"And that would be why we didn't find you till now." Shaniece came to the end of the hall and faced him. Her hair was a clinking waterfall behind her. "We've been looking for others for, oh, almost a year, and you just show up at my door."

"Kismet," Sam agreed. He followed her into the little nook off the kitchen where she kept her computer. The wall was all framed posters and photographs, smiling ordinary people in front of Sears portrait backgrounds and dramatic cut-outs from magazines, all of them watching over her as she typed. She called it her shield of ancestors, but Sam was pretty sure that Nina Simone and Samuel R. Delany and Nelson Mandela were not actual blood relatives. Sam added, "Divine intervention."

Shaniece smiled at him, impossibly young, his own age. How a handful of twentysomethings could stand against an evil so ancient -- "When we get up to a dozen on our team, we should throw a party." She gestured him into a folding chair and settled herself in front of the screen. Of all the stupid obvious things: the other five had found one another in a newsgroup about dream imagery. Sam had never thought to seek people out that way. Shaniece opened a chat window, showed him the icons of the other people waiting. "Okay, this is Kira and Lillian, and Nestor and Freddy. How should I introduce you?"


	3. On the Turning Away

Having paid extra for a rush job, Sam sat impatient in a bar down by the bayou just after noon. It was convenient, that the whole thing had gone down in a city with a Naval Air Station nearby, so the trade for false IDs for underage sailors was brisk; but sailors weren't usually in that much of a hurry, and the clock on the bar's Keno screens was like a grain of sand under his skin. Having eaten a greasy sandwich already, there wasn't anything to do to distract him from the crazy path he'd set himself on. It was making him a little nuts.

So it was kind of a relief to notice the pool table in the back. That soft green baize, the black fake-wood paneling around the frame. Pool always looked like a rich man's game, but Sam had never met anyone rich who played well. His fingers wanted the slim smooth cue to wrap themselves around. And really, he had to test it, right? Find out exactly what he'd gained.

Sam plugged in his quarters and racked the balls and sat the white ball on its button opposite. Till this week, he had only ever sunk one ball at a break. Pool was Dean's gig, and anyway, Sam didn't have the bravado for a con like that, and when you're thirteen and insecure there just isn't any incentive to let your brother challenge you at a game you both know he'll win again and again. Sam hit the ball and broke, and three balls fell into pockets. It all came clear in his head suddenly: the geometry of angles, calculations of force and speed, the sensitivity at the end of the cue like an extra finger. He watched himself, amazed, as he cleaned up the table in about three minutes.

He set down the cue in a corner, a little afraid that he'd shown his hand too much. His contact was watching him, leaning against the wall. Sam hunched his shoulders and led the man out into the back alley, where the cash and the fake driver's licenses changed hands.

"Hey, you want another game of pool?" the guy asked.

Sam shook his head. "I got somebody waiting for me." He walked away quickly, furtive -- he hadn't yet mastered that self-assured strut.

When he slipped into Dean's hospital room, an hour later, he found Dean watching television with a look of supreme boredom on his face. Dean lit up to see his brother, and in that instant Sam wanted to tell him what he'd done at the pool table. He felt in himself the fake-casual stance and knew the right way to capture and draw someone's interest, how to make a boast seem possible and yet a little dubious, and -- Sam controlled himself. This was not a game of pool.

"Hey," Sam said. "How's Oprah?"

"Hell should I know?" laughed Dean. "Not my fault you've got no taste in TV."

"Oh right," Sam replied. "You watch scrambled porn and CNN. How could I forget?" He came up close to Dean, looked him over carefully. They'd shaved him, or let him shave himself, and his hair always stood up like that. He looked like himself, just a little pale under the freckles. The bruises were greening around the edges, ugly but not as ugly as they had been. He'd lost a little weight, but that always happens in hospitals. "You mind if I look?"

Dean shrugged, as if it didn't matter to him, but he eyed carefully as Sam pushed back the bedsheets from his leg. The operation had gone fine, as far as Sam knew; anyway the doctors had clapped him on the back and told him things had gone fine. The leg didn't look fine. The whole thing was swollen from mid-thigh on down, with yellow smears everywhere that might have been iodine or might have been pus or something, but were probably dried blood. There were more stitches than Sam cared to count.

"Dude," Sam said, after a little while. "That's gross. When you broke your wrist it wasn't that gross."

Dean tried elaborately to hide a smile. "Squeamish?"

Sam whapped him on the arm and he laughed out loud. "Who's the one held you down when that clinic doc set your wrist in the first place, while you screamed like a girl?"

"I did not scream like a girl," Dean said, pointing a finger. "That is a hateful rumor."

"Whatever you say, little brother," said Sam. He pulled up a chair. They could go on like this all day.

***

Sam wakes when the ceiling is shadowed gray, night or day he doesn't know. He is still in the same hospital room, or it could be another for all he knows. He has been dreaming, the kind of cracked-out shit that happens when you're on good drugs. He has dreamed that his brother is screaming for him. His fingers wander over the sheets, vaguely searching.

They find another hand that is just resting there. That hand grabs onto his, hot, bony and long-fingered. "You're safe, Sammy," says Dean. He sounds tired. He is sitting at such an angle that Sam can't see his face, can't see anything but that tanned hand. He says again: "You can go back to your life at Stanford. You can go back to normal. I made you safe."

Heavy sleep is resting on his chest, weighting him back down. Sam blinks against it, clears his throat. There is something he wants to say to Dean, and he can't remember it. He lets out a breath and it doesn't have any words in it. He closes his eyes again.

"You rest, Sammy," comes Dean's voice, hypnotic and low. "You're safe now."

***

Sam arrived back at the motel room after getting his hair cut and stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. He'd forgotten that sensation of having an eighth-inch buzz at the back of his neck, and had his fingers in it like a girl for twenty minutes; but it was the visual that was so normal it was weird. Having no hair made his face look bigger; made him look older; made him look tougher. He had a tan line at his eyebrows, and his forehead was disturbingly pale.

Jo eyeballed him from the other side of the motel room, uneasy. Between them, Dean lay asleep. "You look weird," was all she said. She had Dad's journal in her lap, and a notebook open on the table. She was copying out of it neatly, near the end. She'd gotten a lot out of it, in the few days she'd been here.

He finished sorting clothes into two piles, and repacked his bag, and set it on the edge of the empty bed. "Are you going to be okay with this?" he asked, after a moment. "I didn't think you'd come. I know I'm not your favorite person --"

"You knew I'd come," she said. And it was true, he hadn't wondered. He'd called her up at two in the morning and expected her to be there at dawn, and she had arrived, stomping mad and silent. They'd been at close quarters and she hadn't smiled once, but that wasn't too far from normal. She wasn't smiling now -- just fixing him with that wide, pitiless stare.

"Right. I'll just -- right."

Jo sat stiff-necked and straight-backed, the pen still in her hand. She blinked away after a moment, as if he were frightening. She would know. "What do you want me to tell Ellen?" she asked loudly, examining the thumbed pages Dad had assembled. It felt weird, to allow any eyes but Winchester eyes to look at it, but a bargain was a bargain. "He'll call her up one day and ask after Dean, and she'll figure it all out."

He hushed her with his hands. "I'll think of something." Dean stirred, and subsided again.

Dean was drugged to the gills, of course, and even unmedicated he could sleep through a thunderstorm. Sam had found a long-sleeved shirt and tied Dean's left wrist to the handle of the nightstand, so he wouldn't roll over in the night and cause himself damage. He was going to be the crankiest man alive when he woke up in the morning.

"He's going to be mad." Jo laughed, a hard sour sound.

"Yeah, well, he'll get used to it," Sam answered, and that came out meaner than he'd intended. He'd been doing that a lot, this last couple of days, result of the shock or a symptom of the change or some damn thing. He put it out of his mind by brute force -- another new skill he'd acquired. He had too much to do to sit around dithering about clothes.

He finished cleaning up, put on the leather jacket. Nothing fit quite right. The chunk of silver on his finger was heavy on his right hand, made him feel a little out of balance. He pulled out the two leather bracelets, the watch -- actually, that was a lot of jewelry, for a guy. He did not know how to think of himself as vain. Last was the pendant, the brass bull on a black thong. He put it on, felt its weight on his chest. _This is mine_ , he told himself. But he took it off after all.

The beds were side by side, knock-knees close as always. Sam sat on the other bed and looked over his brother. He wasn't tangled in the sheets too badly, but they covered his legs, hiding the brace that kept the knee still. His free hand was up behind his head, under the pillow, a position that would have his fingertips numb after a little while. His eye sockets were a little shadowed; it had been a hard day, getting him checked out of the hospital and settled in here. Sam noted the crow's feet encroaching on his temples, the way he slept with his tongue hard against the backs of his front teeth, as if in constant vigilance against snoring. He'd never snored that Sam had heard, but he'd bitten his tongue getting startled awake a hundred times.

"Hey little brother," Sam said, low. He nudged Dean's hip till one heavy lid lifted and showed the green eye underneath. Dean made a dull querying noise in the back of his throat. Jo glanced their way, and then pretended Sam didn't exist. "I have to go now. It's just some minor details, stuff I have to take care of, and then I'll be back. You're safe now, so you don't have to worry about me."

Dean's eye drifted shut. Sam couldn't think of what else to say. He reached up and freed that hand from under the pillow. A knife came with it, of course, not the usual hunting knife but a littler one. Sam's old mumblety-peg knife. Sam confiscated the blade and settled Dean's hand on his chest. Under his hand, under Sam's hand, a thumping heart, steady and fine. Safe.

"Okay," Sam said, mostly to himself, to make himself stand up. He closed the mumblety-peg knife and pocketed it. He really should leave it behind, as he'd done all the mementoes of being Sam -- things of Dad's, pictures of his college friends -- but he was going to need knives where he was going, and Dean would not. Jo craned her neck, like he was Godzilla standing over her or something. "I guess I should -- go. Are you sure you've got --"

" _Dean_ ," she chided him. "You're acting like him already."

Sam nodded to himself. "Okay. I guess it's time."


	4. Highway Star

Sam wakes up slowly, aware of the pain way before he realizes that means he is awake. He opens his eyes and sees Jo sitting at the little table, frowning at a notebook. Dean is not in the room. He rubs one hand on his face, tugging at the other one before realizing that it's tied down. Oh, right. The movement draws Jo's attention.

Somehow she can just tell by looking what kind of pain he's in. She comes to untie his wrist and feed him pills without a word.

"Where's Dean?" he asks, still fuzzy.

"He left last night. I guess you don't remember him saying goodbye." She is intent on the prescription bottles, counting out one of this and another of that. Sam casts backwards into the fuzzy parts of his brain and finds Dean's voice saying, _stuff I have to take care of_. Jo says, "He left a bunch of stuff, to replace what got destroyed. New driver's license for you, Mister Tommy Walker."

"Oh my God I am sorry I ever introduced him to The Who," Sam chokes out, while she drops painkillers and antibiotics into his hand.

"You're a deaf, dumb and blind kid, all right," she says, and moves on. "Couple new credit cards all in the black, a Blue Cross card for getting the stitches out." She watches him shake the pills in his hand like dice and then holds the glass up to his mouth, as if he's a baby or something. She adds, "Didn't say when he'd be back. He left you this."

She puts up her hand, a leather thong twined into her fingers. On the end of it, resting in the middle of her palm, is Dean's brass bull pendant. He's been wearing that for -- anyway, since he was ten years old, at least. Sam is pretty sure the only reasons he takes it off are sex and showering, and maybe not for sex. Seeing it dangle from some random girl's hand --

He snatches it away from Jo awkwardly, half falling out of the bed, and slings it around his neck immediately. "How long'd he say he'd be gone?" That sounds nastier than he means it to, but Jo doesn't seem to notice. She puts the pill-bottles back in order on the nightstand and goes back to the table and her notebook.

"He didn't. It sounded like a while, though."

Sam grumbles in his throat, struggling upright. He surveys the room and realizes how far away things are, when you can't walk. He will be absolutely useless on the road, for a good long while. No wonder Dean has skipped out on him. "He just assumed you'd take care of me?"

She shrugs. "Kinda, yeah. I mean, we talked about it first." Sam pulls at his blankets, maneuvering himself to get up. The crutches are against the wall, hard to reach, and the cast-brace-thing on his knee is not helping with the flexibility. "Whoa whoa whoa, they said two weeks on bed rest," she starts, and puts a hand on his chest.

"I am going to go take a leak," he snaps at her, and waves her hands off his body. "If you want to watch, hey, I'm all for that. But if they wanted me to pee in a jar, they woulda kept me in the hospital."

"But Dean --" Jo stops, shrinks back as if she's expecting him to explode. But she doesn't say anything more, and Sam just wants to tap a kidney, so he shrugs and scrambles his way one-legged out of the bed and grabs the crutches. He hobbles into the bathroom okay, but then getting out again he's tangled in the door and bangs around, swearing, till he can get free. Jo's there, holding the door out of the way, eyes on the floor in case he might actually think she did watch. Crazy standoffish girl.

"How the hell am I going to get pants on?" he asks himself.

But Jo's there for that too: "You're not. Bed rest." She tugs on his elbow, pointing him towards his sheets.

"So, what, I'm gonna sit around in my underwear in this motel room for the next fourteen days?"

"I'll make you a deal: I'll wash your underwear if I don't have to hear you talk about it."

Sam is honor-bound to whine, but he's sore enough to shuffle in the prescribed direction. "Okay, fine, Nurse Ratched. You going to tell me what I can watch on TV?" He squirms his way into a comfortable sitting position while Jo slips a pillow under his foot.

"That feel okay? Here," she says, and surrenders the remote after all. She smiles at him. "I was thinking about painting your toenails later. I've got some pink glitter polish. What do you say?"

This is unbelievable cruelty, from a girl who has no siblings. "Oh you would not."

Jo gives him that shit-eating grin of hers, the one that says _My mom won't ever find out_ , and he can't help but grin back at her. This might be the first good mood she's been in since he woke up in the hospital. "Maybe we can compromise. We can negotiate color choices over breakfast."

Sam groans, "How about black," and flips on the television. The morning shows are a tinny bright array before his eyes.

"Good choice." She slings on her purse and heads out to forage.

Sam has never been laid up this bad before, so he doesn't even know you can get takeout from IHOP. His queen and savior fumbles the door unlocked twenty minutes later, smelling like heaven and hash browns, and plops the whole bag of takeout boxes in his lap. "I left the coffees on the roof of the car," she calls on her way out again, and he's halfway through his first pancake (rolled up and dipped in the butter: how else do you eat a pancake in bed?) by the time she's back again.

"There's some forks and stuff in that bag too," she says, but it can't be that bad an offense to manners because she sets the coffees on the side table and sits next to his hip and bats away his fingers from the sausage. "Mine."

"Yes, ma'am," he laughs, and they settle in to eat in good humor.

They're down to toast and bites of melon the texture of ice cubes when Jo asks, "So, how do you feel about Gainesville?"

He mulls it over, chewing. "College town, right? Could be worse. Wasn't there a serial killer there, back in the early nineties?"

"Bingo," she says, lit with that stalking thrill. "That kind of thing leaves a mark, if you know what I mean."

Sam looks at his toes down the end of the bed. She's actually not wrong; his toenails could stand to be cut and he can't exactly do it himself. "Wouldn't it be kind of a hindrance, looking after a cripple while you're trying to hunt?"

"Hey, I got a call this morning, from the Wheelchairs and Amputations Local 2114. Guess what: if you're gonna get better, you're not allowed to call yourself a cripple."

"Oh, I'm hurt," he laughs. She gives him one perfect dark eyebrow. "Seriously, though, what do you want me around for?"

Jo hides her anticipation behind her coffee cup. "You can teach me, right? Everything that's in the book." The book. Of course: Dad's journal. Probably Dean took it with him -- if it's anywhere, it's on the front seat of the Impala. "Everything your dad taught you." She takes a big gulp of coffee.

Her hands on the plastic cup tap it and twirl it, uneasy. Sam thinks about her and him and history. Winchesters and Harvelles haven't really done well together, in the past. "Isn't this how my dad got your dad killed?"

She snaps back immediately. "Guess what: you're a cripple. You'll be working in a Yoda capacity only."

That merits a grin. "Yoda, huh? Do I get to make you run around swamps and carry rocks in a knapsack?"

Jo spreads her hands to encompass the skeletal remains of breakfast. "I'll keep you fed and housed, how's that? My apartment's not big, but it's furnished."

"If I get to call you grasshopper, it's a deal." He sticks out his hand for a shake.

"What?" she asks, shaking it blankly.

Sam cannot fathom this gap in her education. "You never saw reruns of Kung Fu? How about, uh, the Green Hornet? How the West Was Won? The A-Team? Mission Impossible? You know Mister Spock was on that show, don't you? The original I mean, not the early-nineties remake."

"Um, no?"

"Didn't you ever have cable? Okay, we got some serious lessons to impart, young Jedi."

***

Where his fellow specials sent him, Sam went, acting as much like a hired gunslinger as one of their number. No, that wasn't fair; all of them had jobs and families, while he could drive off and find a tiny town called Greeley, Texas on a late afternoon two weeks before Thanksgiving, the air thin and cool and weirdly threatening. It wasn't a big enough town to get lost in, so finding Gertie Dodson wasn't going to be very hard. All he had was a street address and her driver's license photo, and he found her house dark and wrapped in tarpaulin, the cottonwood tree in the front yard a charred stump.

He ended up finding Gertie by connecting his face with her fist. He walked into the bar before the fight actually started, but was trying to be subtle about approaching her, and ordered a beer a good six feet away from where she was flipping off a guy with more tattoos than sense. The plan was to strike up a conversation, not in a leering way but in that standoffish stranger way he knew he could do, and eventually ask her what her dreams were like. But the middle finger kind of escalated things.

The beer came and sat untouched in front of him while Tattoo Man raised his voice; calling a woman a bitch in public was a mistake even if she wasn't almost six feet tall in heels and wearing a studded dog-collar as a necklace. The woman in question was also muscular, her back strong-looking but not especially bulky, like a long-distance runner or a soccer player. Sam turned to watch them, Tattoo Man looming over her red-faced and she not backing down; the set of her bare shoulders showed she was ready for a fight. So when she hauled off and hit him, Sam had just time to make sure his beer was at a safe distance before wading into the fray.

Tattoo Man was not the sort of gentleman who refuses to hit a woman, and just as well, because the first blow made a crunch like she'd broken his nose. He was still recovering, pulling his fists tight and not even checking on the flow of blood down his face, when Sam put out an arm in between them, saying, "Whoa now, no need --"

The girl needed. She screwed up her round face -- a girlish face, younger than her years -- and punched him hard in the jaw. Sam stumbled back and where his arm had just been she made a come-on gesture at Tattoo Man, who obliged. She blocked the first haymaker, and took a glancing blow on her upper arm in lieu of the second's full power. Her bra strap fell out from under the tank top she was wearing. She swore and jabbed at Tattoo Man, straightening him out enough for a knee to the jewels, and while Sam was still trying to elbow his way in -- he felt himself connect with _something_ \-- she let her opponent slump groaning to the floor.

"Okay, whoa," he began, and realized the fight was basically over. "Sorry. I was going to see if it couldn't be worked out peacefully." The girl was licking blood off a split in her lower lip. "Oh, shit, I did that. I am so sorry."

She looked him up and down, from the hand in front of her, closing off her further approach to Tattoo Man, to the spot on his jaw that was surely turning red and puffy even now. She had big prominent eyes heavily pencilled, and a turned-up nose, and cropped hair recently dyed black. If her lipstick had been black instead of warning red, Sam would have called her a goth. "Butt out, Wilt Chamberlain," she said, and gave him her back. The bartender was right there, wary, and she asked for another beer.

Sam didn't know how many she'd already had, but the bartender was on the cusp of denying it to her when Sam stepped up close. "It's okay," he said. "She'll drink it with me, sitting down at a table, and then we'll leave."

The mumble that came from her mouth might have been "like hell I will", or it might have been an acknowledgement that he was extracting her from possible assault charges. Sam waited till she actually faced the row of tables and had taken a step towards one before retrieving his own beer from the safe place he'd left it.

"I'm not, you know," was how he began the conversation, once they both had something to drink and a seat away from Tattoo Man. "I'm not trying to get into your pants or anything. We can just sit here politely and when you're done you can get up and leave."

She could drink pretty quickly, when she had the motivation.

"Or," Sam added, "I can tell you about why I came all the way across the country to meet you. I think we have a lot in common."

Gertie put down her glass long enough to say, "I can think of better pickup lines." Sam faced her skepticism, let it wash over him, hunched forward to impart to her the secrets she didn't even know she needed.

"I won't scare you with how much I've learned about you, Gertrude Annmarie Dodson." She sat up instantly, poised to run. "Instead I'll tell you about me. My name is Dean Winchester, and I lost some family in a housefire. Mine was a long time ago, but the upshot was something I think you'll recognize. I have these dreams -- frightening dreams that seem too real. There's a man who isn't all there, like he's made of dark mist, except for his eyes. His eyes are yellow. You want me to go on?"

"Who the fuck are you," she breathed.

Sam grimaced at her, calculating his words' impact. "Everybody like us started at about the same time, and it's mostly the same. I'm a little different, I guess -- I get migraines in the day instead of the night-terrors. There are six other people like you and me that I know of, and each of us has lost somebody or something, and each of us gained something too. Have you figured yours out?"

That tough all-bristles woman sat knock-kneed, shoulders-in, and sniffled. "Fuck," she mumbled. "What the fuck is going on?"

Pitiless, Sam charged on, his voice low and insistent. "Andy Gallagher lost his adoptive mother in a fire. He can persuade anybody of anything, just by saying so. Nestor Ramirez's older brother drowned three years ago. He can find people or things, even if they don't want to be found. Shaniece Custus's father asphyxiated when she was two years old, and now she can invent new magic spells like you wouldn't believe. Me, I just dream the future."

"Who'd you lose?" the girl asked, putting her elbows on the table. She held her hands up near her face, didn't try to pretend she wasn't wiping tears from her cheeks.

Sam sat back. "My mother. I was really young. I don't remember her at all."

Of course she was still raw, naked: "So my girlfriend had to pay for this cool new skill I got? I'll give it back."

He didn't know what to say to that. If someone had come to him, just weeks after Jess had died, he might have -- but he'd been with Dean, hadn't he? He hadn't needed a mysterious stranger to swoop in and tell him it wasn't his fault. He learned that himself, as the days turned into years. He asked, "What can you do?"

She glanced around the bar, and Sam glanced with her. There weren't many people around; it was a Tuesday. Tattoo Man was standing upright, back at the bar and drinking himself into amnesia over having been beaten up by a girl. When Sam brought his eyes back to the table she was leaning towards him, tears over with for now. "Outside," she said.

They drank their beers like civilized people and Sam thanked the bartender and they let themselves out into the crisp Texas night. She had a bomber jacket that she slung on, and a gray cotton scarf with ragged edges, hand-knitted. Sam automatically led her to the Impala, and only realized when they stopped in front of it that he did seem like he was trying to get into her pants. "Can you tell me here?" he asked, and stuck his hands into his back pockets.

Long fingers drifted over the car's roof, swung down its window, and came to rest on the driver's side door-handle. "This was your father's car. He bought it when he was seventeen, with a loan from his older sister. He loved this car. He washed it every weekend, at first, and when he --"

Sam snatched her hand away, rougher than he'd intended. "That's enough." The image flared in his head, from photos tucked into the front of the journal: Dad when he'd hung skinny off that pair of shoulders like a uniform on a coathanger. Dad when he'd been a grinner, before everything. She might have seen more, but no point in her telling it.

"You see the future," Gertie said, eyes big and dark on him. "I see the past. Not of people, but of anything I can touch. I know people through their stuff." She did not pull her hand free from his.

"Let's take a ride," he said, and she slid into the passenger seat like it was waiting there for her. He lifted his right elbow as he turned the keys and he could feel her body heat. He pulled out onto the road, and out of the circle of streetlights that was her home town, and she didn't object as he drove onto the highway, heading for the darkened prairie.

She was fiddling with the radio like she had the right. "Your ability," he said absently, as Clapton came in strong. "That thing, it also makes you vulnerable. If the guy with the yellow eyes can't exploit you, he'll come after you, drive you crazy."

She laughed, and turned her head to stare out at the cold dim landscape. "I wake up screaming," she said. "There isn't much he could do to me I don't already do to myself."

Sam decided not to tell her about all the things he'd seen demon do. It would be too much to take in all at once, even for a tough girl like her.

The car was eager, warm, its throttle low and dangerous like the voice of Kathleen Turner. Sam slowed and palmed the wheel all the way as he pulled off the highway, throwing up dirt as his rear wheel left the road.

"What?" she asked.

Sam could feel the loneliness and the hope sloshing in him like a washing machine about to tip over. "If you're coming on the road with me, you're gonna need to pack a bag."

"On the road," she said to the windshield. "On the road," she muttered, stabbing a finger at the glove box till it popped open. False ID cards showered onto her knees and she sifted through them, expressionless. "Lemme think about it," she said.

"Sure." Abruptly he found himself grinning, charm welling out of him he didn't know he had. "As long as it takes to get your stuff together."

Gertie nodded, and stared at the lights of downtown in front of them.


	5. Hell Bent for Leather

Sam is undone by paperwork. He cannot remember for the life of him how he managed to apply to college. But that's what Jo is for, ghosting around behind him with the folder stuffed with charts and handouts and copies of his x-rays from the hospital up the street. That and holding doors. And driving him around. And fetching meals. Although, he's a master at changing channels just in time to avoid irritating commercials. So it's not like he can't do _anything_ for himself.

But getting the stitches out is kind of a big deal, and when Jo follows him into the tiny white clinic room, he's glad not to be by himself. The walls are covered with smiling kids in Polaroids and charts of how tall they should be. All the flat surfaces in the room give the walls the lie, though: they're made of cold steel and paper, like a torture chamber. The dude in the white coat strolls in and gets down to business: he wrestles off the cast-brace-thing and lays bare the whole leg, naked on the table.

 _My knee looks like a baseball_ is all Sam can think. They sewed up the incisions with something weird like industrial staples, so the marks on either side the kneecap really do look like seams on a ball, down to the angry red on pasty pale white. All he needs is an MLB stamp in the middle. That is fucked up.

Jo mumbles something about Frankenstein, not-really-joking, and sort of hovers by his shoulder, as if he might burst into tears and tuck his head into her bosom. Which he might try on somebody else, but Jo would probably sock him one. Frankenstein's the right word, though. The bolts that keep his bones and tendons anchored down are probably in there for life.

Pulling out the staples, with something that looks like an overgrown toenail clipper, takes a long time. Sam stares at the doctor's bald spot and listens to the air conditioning while little bits of metal go _ting_ in the waiting tray. Sam would really like for someone to strike up a conversation about something, but the dude in the white coat is intent on his work and Jo's not talking. Jo is prying at his fingers, in fact. She pries them one by one off the edge of the table and holds on tight to his hand. She puts her free hand on his left shoulder and rubs at some old scar. He can't even remember how he got it, but her fingers just know where it is and massage it gently.

"Do you want a painkiller?" she asks, low. As if the doctor's not supposed to hear.

Sam shrugs, watching the staples gleam. "It doesn't hurt a lot. Just kind of annoying." She and the doctor both shoot him funny looks, and she doesn't take her hand away.

"How's the head?" she asks, like it's an ordinary thing you ask somebody in front of strangers.

He laughs her off. "Well, I think I'm brain damaged for life, but I wouldn't know the difference."

"Seriously." She grips his shoulder like he's about to get thrashed.

Sam gives in. "I still don't have that night. Probably won't ever. I guess there are some things I forgot, but hey, I don't know what they are, right?"

She gives him the weirdest look, but she doesn't say anything.

When he's done with the stitches, the doctor goes tapping and poking down Sam's calf below the bad knee, like he's feeling for the screws under the skin and can't see the staple-holes he was just looking at. The instant he gets his hand around Sam's ankle some kind of circuit goes off in Sam's head and he kicks out with his free foot, unthinking. It is freakish, like somebody else owns that foot, and Sam doesn't know what to make of it.

"Sorry," he mumbles.

The doctor doesn't act surprised. He screws up his lips and nods and moves on, and the next time he touches Sam it's with a lot more warning. He doesn't even ask for an explanation. "You don't feel this?" the doctor asks.

He is poking Sam in the side of his foot with a little pin. Sam can see it with his own eyes. "No?" Sam answers, dumbfounded.

"A little bit of nerve damage, in a break like this, isn't unheard of. It might come back, yet. Anyway, you can still flex your toes, so the function's pretty good. So," the doctor segues, "that's something we'll want to address in physical therapy. Have you looked into where you want to go for your appointments?"

"We don't live around here. We'll do it when we get home," Jo says, nudging Sam in the back.

The doctor pauses, gives them both a sad little smile like he thinks they're playing some kind of game. "If your insurance doesn't cover all of it, you should still max out what they allow. Do you know about Medicaid?"

Sam doesn't actually understand what Medicaid is, but he sees Jo stiffen and flush red, and he's got the general idea.

"Medicaid doesn't cover physical therapy in this state, but -- where did you say you're from?"

"Kansas," Sam says instantly, at the same moment that Jo is saying,

"Montana." She turns big stifling eyes on him and what he's got to stifle is a big old laugh. "He comes from Kansas. We're on vacation here from Montana."

The doctor is all earnest. "Well, do what you can within the medical system. If there's a local clinic, they can help advise you on your rehab. And if you'll wait just a second --" he fumbles in his pockets for some kind of hand-held, "I can print out some pages of exercises for you. In case you don't make it back to a doctor any time soon."

He bustles out and after a few minutes bustles back in, talking to Jo because Sam isn't really listening. Sam is staring at his leg, bare for a little while before the new brace -- Velcro, this time -- is introduced. Sam is noticing how thin his thigh has gotten, in just two weeks, and how swollen the joint still is. He is noticing how the sections of his leg that they shaved are starting to grow in. He is wondering whether Dean's _stuff to take care of_ will turn out to be a lot of stuff, and take quite a while. Sam will not be off crutches for months, yet.

The doctor unveils the new brace, which at least is smaller and with a locking hinge and has a little cutout right over the kneecap. "Ha," says Jo. "I am so drawing smiley faces in that circle."

Sam laughs for her sake. She follows the doctor's hands as he shows her how to get it on and off, and her fingertips are the ones that smooth the Velcro in place to stay. She tugs at the ragged edge of his one-legged jeans, cut off high on the thigh on his right side to give the brace room. She has not argued with him over his refusal to wear shorts. She taps him on the big toe (nail painted black, oh yes) and gathers up her folder of his fucked-up body. The doctor points again to the sheets he has printed out for her, earnest.

Crutches make a pretty good doorstop, once you're used to them. After only two weeks, and all of that bedrest, Sam has got the toughest armpits in Florida. He hikes himself down the hallway with Jo at his side.

"Okay, Daniel-san," he tells Jo, who is lost in thought: probably doing the math about his medical expenses. Jo startles at his voice, brings her head up suddenly and squares her shoulders, like she's afraid she looks too girly, too young. "You sure you don't want to be a doctor instead?"

"You look like shit," she says, adding: "Mister Miyagi." She pulls out her car keys, not offering to do anything about how he looks, just -- stating the facts.

"Lesson number one," says Sam, as they head into the parking lot. "When a guy is trying to be stoic, you don't tell him he's being stoic. That kind of ruins the whole thing."

Jo laughs. "Yessir."

They stand in front of her car together. It is truly the ugliest car in the world, Japanese and boxy, _economical_. "And I am way too young to be called sir, unless you are actually wearing a maid's outfit."

She doesn't even ask, just takes his crutches from him as he slides himself into the seat. "In your dreams," she says, with that shit-eating grin.

***

Sam and Gertie let themselves out of the Impala in Horse's Lick, Texas, in search of breakfast and a music store that still sold cassette tapes.

"I cannot believe you have never owned any Joan Jett," she moaned. "You don't like Ani or Sarah, okay, that's a musical choice. But Joan Jett _is_ classic rock, and harder than any stupid 80s hair band."

Sam asked, "Did she turn herself into a stuttering idiot from the amount of drugs she took during the 70s?"

"I don't think so? Anyway, that just proves she was a true rocker, not just in it for the girls."

"Unlike you," Sam teased.

"Oh you would totally have me in a second, if you could," she leered back. Sam realized, after a moment, that this was true. She was a bit skinny, not barely B-cups, but her long waist -- that was Dean-thinking, and he suppressed it firmly.

They found themselves a booth at the diner and drank sour coffee. Gertie wanted waffles, but this didn't look like the kind of place for waffles.Turned out it wasn't, and Gertie had to order the sulkiest short stack of pancakes Horse's Lick had ever seen. Sam confined his breakfast fantasies to things actually on the menu, eggs and bacon and toast, ordinary stuff. At least he hadn't taken on Dean's sense of taste, because there wasn't a good enough reason in the world to put ketchup on eggs.

Gertie had exhausted the topic of Joan Jett, and was explaining why Patti Smith was important to rock history, when Sam felt himself coming to alert. It wasn't something conscious that bothered him, in the quiet diner in a quiet town -- just something in the air on the back of his neck. Gertie talked and Sam shifted on the Naugahyde seat, glancing out the window. The street was clear, just a couple of cars parked in front of the post office. No cops. Someone was standing in front of the Impala.

That shouldn't have been weird. It was a cool car, and people liked to look at it. This someone was rangy, slim, dressed in dusty work clothes and a straw hat. He had one hand in a back pocket of his jeans, and the other pocket was worn pale and thready against a habitual object: tall, slim, a tiny glimpse of steel at the top of the pocket. Clasp-knife.

"What?" asked Gertie. Sam blinked back to her and tugged on her hand.

"Don't stare. Somebody interested in the car. Don't draw attention."

Gertie laughed, an unpleasant noise. "Um, I know you say y'all sometimes, but you don't exactly blend in either, guy."

Sam sipped his coffee and stared everywhere else but out the window. Gertie spun the salt shaker and waggled packets of sugar and rolled her eyes like they might fall out of her head. The man who had been looking at the car stood in the diner's door, glanced around casual as you please, and found Sam instantly.

"Here he comes," Sam muttered, and Gertie snapped to attention.

The guy walked right up and slid into the booth like they'd been waiting for him. Gertie squirmed away from the man and up against the corner, but he didn't even look at her. "Winchester," he said, like an accusation.

"Who?" asked Sam.

"I knowed John and I knowed that car since you was on a tricycle, kid. Quit playin."

Gertie's eyes were round. Sam felt under the table with one hand to find her knee, squeeze it. No point in her drawing every eye in the place until it actually came to that. "He died two years ago," he said. This was work he knew how to do, keep an expression of casual disinterest under hostile questioning. He was running out of coffee to drink, and he didn't want to draw the waitress.

"And you're his son as you live and breathe. He had two of 'em. Which one are you?"

"Dean," Sam answered instantly. "This is my girlfriend, Gertie." Gertie was biting her lip and digging her nails into the back of Sam's hand under the table. She definitely did not want to be introduced to this man.

The man in the straw hat cocked his head. His eyes were blue, narrow, squinty. "You bring that brother with you? The cursed one?"

Sam blurted it, as if he were confessing a secret: "He's dead. He turned up strange last fall and I put him down." With a jerk so fast it might have been involuntary, Gertie pulled away from him under the table. Sam felt a wave of rage in him: at Gertie, at this stranger, at the idea of putting a gun to Dean's head as if he were a dog in the street. He spun out the lie, using his anger to make it seem more true: "No more poltergeists for me -- we're full-time on possessions, now."

Gertie was white, shaking a little, but with her eyes down like she was pulling herself together. The man in the straw hat gazed up and down Sam's figure, eyes like pitiless beacons. "That's hard," he said at last. "I done it to a drinkin buddy one time, after a fade ripped him in half. Hard business." The man nodded, and Sam nodded with him. Sam was pleased to see Gertie nod a little bit too, her lips a thin line as if she had any idea the details of the business they were talking about. "Welp, you got plenty of work comin your way. Demons walkin the earth, like I never seen."

They all sat there, then, and in the pause the waitress came by with the coffee pot and an extra mug. "No, ma'am, I can't stay," said the man in the straw hat. Sam and Gertie glanced at one another. After the waitress left, the man said, "Now look. You want to head outta here soon as you can. I can't say as how we was friends -- that man was a bag of rattlesnakes -- but I was friendly with your father. So I'll tell you -- a hunter sees that car, he might not wait to find out who's in it. You'd best move on."

"We were just leaving," Gertie said, slowly.

"Just this area?" asked Sam. "Or is the word out all over?"

"Gordon Walker let some know. He's in the north, doing time. He's from down the city, but he knows which side he's on." The man in the straw hat stood up and cricked his back. "Probly in Arkansas you'll be safe. They don't know nothin in Arkansas."

"Thanks," Sam said faintly, and the man in the straw hat nodded and walked away.

Gertie and Sam sat facing each other in silence for the two or three minutes before their food came. They both had their elbows on the melamine table. They both were frowning. The plates slid in front of them and Sam managed to thank the waitress before she left.

Gertie picked at her pancakes with a fork. "What --"

Sam interrupted. "Not here," he said.

They did not talk further over breakfast. They finished up and paid and walked out onto the street and got directly into the car. Gertie didn't even mention her quest for Joan Jett tapes. They beat a path out of town, and didn't stop till they were in Louisiana.


	6. Wish You Were Here

"The fucking car won't start," is how Jo greets him, ten minutes after she's said goodbye. Sam is on the couch, adding notes to Jo's book, a little bit amazed to see his father's research and anger transcribed in somebody else's handwriting. He has been brains-deep in death omens, and he has to shake his head to bring himself back to the present while she bustles around the kitchen.

"What does it sound like when you turn the key?"

"I don't know." She pulls down the jar where she keeps her tips from the cabinet and is counting out ones for herself. "What does a car that won't start sound like?" Her braided hair is already pulling loose, she is so frazzled. Amazing what you learn about a girl, living with her. He's still getting over the part where she's not a natural blonde.

"Hey, seriously," he tells her. "Clicking really fast, or like a slowed-down LP?"

For the first time, Jo looks at him. "LP. Why?"

Sam smiles, and climbs up off the couch. Automatically, she puts down the jar and reaches to hand him his crutches, but he's put them aside near enough he doesn't need her help. "I bet Dean could fix that in about two minutes. Hell, I could probably fix it, and you won't even be late to work."

Jo is all frowns. "Good, cause your pizza habit is seriously eating into my ability to pay for a taxi." She leaves the tip jar where it is, though, without going back for the cash. She follows him out the front door of her apartment (carefully locking it behind them) and doesn't say anything about how slowly he has to take the stairs (very). She turns a little red at the voluptuous girl from downstairs in an extremely voluptuous sweater who is loitering by the mailboxes, on the off chance Sam might need help carrying an electric bill. Jo will bug him about that later, but it is _so_ not his fault that crutches are college-girl kryptonite. Seriously. He has to get the mail every day, you know? And the stairs are good practice for his leg.

He doesn't have time to give the girl anything but a grin, because if Jo is late one more time to the Big Bite Bar & Grill she will definitely be fired. "When you get a break, you should go on over to the auto parts store and buy a new battery, and if you don't have cables get them too. Just tell them make and model and they'll show you the right one to get." Sam is crutching across the parking lot, putting weight on the leg every fourth step, and so far so -- sore, but not crying out at him. He is getting a good workout going long distances, keeping him warm despite the January chill and his lack of shoes. "Get cash off that last card and use that."

Jo makes a noise. She is dancing around him like she has to pee as he works his way over to her space in the lot, desperate to get to her crappy job on time, and she makes a noise every time he mentions their best source of emergency cash. He just doesn't get it; but then, except for hustling poker, she's always been honest about money. How she'll be a hunter he doesn't know; it's the kind of business that incurs a lot of expenses, and doesn't pay.

Thinking about hunting makes him think about Dean. It is late January, and out there somewhere, in five days, Dean will be turning 30. Sam wants awfully to ask Jo whether she's heard from him, and doesn't. She would mention it, if she had heard from him. It's only been three months. Taking care of stuff takes time.

They get most of the way to the car in silence, as if Jo can read his mind. Sam glances at her and mumbles, "Hideous car," loud enough so she will hear it. She doesn't laugh.

It feels good, to pop the hood, a lever in front of the grille like old cars. Even if the hood is boxy and dull gray; even if all the markings on the engine are in Japanese characters as well as English. Sam puts all his weight on his left leg and he can lean forward on his hands without the crutches getting in the way. He's learned a lot, watching Dean over the years: one engine's like any other.

"Here we go," he calls, and she comes to look, folding her hands up high on her chest like the grease is going to jump out at her. He flicks at the battery leads with a thumbnail, shows it to her. It's covered with black gunk and salt residue and rust, which is evidence once and for all that she's never gotten the car a tuneup in its life. Even butt-ugly cars deserve tune-ups. "Your leads get obstructed, and your battery's getting old anyway, not enough juice gets from the battery to the starter, and you get the slowed-down LP noise. Any dirtier, and you'd have to ask the coeds downstairs for a jump."

She curls her lip at him as if he's suggested something _really_ dirty. "Can you fix it?"

He smiles at her sweetly and does what he can with his bare hands. Which is not a whole lot. He contemplates the relative state of messiness in her apartment, and asks, "You got any WD-40? And a rag or something in the trunk?"

"I -- don't think so?" she says. She probably has Jimmy Hoffa in there, along with all the beat-up books and empty cassette boxes and enough candy wrappers to paper her bedroom. He has not yet been handy enough to weld her a false-bottomed hiding space for the essentials.

"Girls!" he scoffs, and pulls his t-shirt off over his head. This drags a strangled noise out of her, as she stands there, keys in hand, awkward next to him; he gives her a devilish grin over his shoulder. With a little spit and a lot of ruining the nice white cotton, he cleans up the leads about as well as can be had without some kind of solvent. His pendant swings over the battery, hanging off his neck, like some kind of talisman for good conductivity. "You want to try it now?"

That gets her hopping, and she plugs herself into the driver's seat. The car groans at her like it just accidentally rolled over on its own broken leg, and then it flares and the engine catches. With the hood up, he cannot see into the driver's seat to wink at her properly, but she obliges and (engine still running) hops out of the car and starts pulling on the hood while his head's still under it.

Sam backs up and rests himself on the crutches again and watches her dart around, slamming down the hood and handing him his dirty t-shirt and climbing back into the car and then slapping herself on the forehead like a cartoon character and climbing back out again. "Damn, I am an idiot," she tells him, breathless, and presses the apartment key into his hand. "You don't want to spend a whole evening stuck with the coeds. I know you like dumb blondes, but there's got to be a bottom limit." Jo palms the side of his face, too gentle for a slap. "Thanks."

There's that smile that makes her look like a whole different person. She hops back into the car and peels out. At that rate of speed, she will probably not be late to the Big Bite Bar & Grill. She might get arrested, though.

Sam is left there in the parking lot by himself, with crutches and no shirt on and a key in his hand. He feels a little ridiculous, standing in the long shadows of a Florida afternoon in January, shivering a little. He tucks the shirt into his back pocket and makes his slow way back to the building.

To his great sorrow, the sweater girl has gone inside by the time he is ready to struggle his way up the stairs. He lets himself into the apartment and puts all the cash back into the tip jar and puts it away on its high shelf. He settles back in on the couch with Jo's version of the book, deciphering her loopy scrawl and Dad's cryptic way of recording things. At the bottom of a page about ancestor-worship, he'd written "Disperse = exsolvatur, exsolvantur. Keds size 12." -- probably Sam's own shoe size, a reminder to go shopping on the way home from putting the hurt on bad guys. How he managed it Sam doesn't know. He flips ahead to the pages he knows Dean wrote, although of course it's all in Jo's handwriting. Sam can remember the difference. He flips ahead to those pages, just to read the words, to say hello to them.

He realizes after a minute or two that he'll have to be awake at two in the morning, to let Jo into her own house when she gets off-shift. He somehow suspects she won't remember to buy a new car battery while she is at it.

Good thing she keeps him around.

***

Gertie was looking out the window, quiet. The engine was off and Sam was sitting next to her. She had been quiet for weeks, since Texas. She had never completed the question she had begun in the diner. Stakeouts with Dean had never been this awkward.

"Hey," he said, he said suddenly. "You want to find me a tape? Anything'll do."

Sam wasn't even sure where the tape box was, except probably in the back seat. He got a pair of Doc Martens in his face as Gertie crawled over the seat, and listened to her grunting and muttering as she delved into every under-seat cranny with its mislaid peanuts and stray screws. The radio spat static, low, and Sam listened to the light rain on the windshield. Higher up in the hills of Pennsylvania, it had been fitful snow; the fan was on as high as it would go.

It had been a stressful afternoon, navigating mountain switchbacks in a car with old-fashioned brakes and rear-wheel drive. Even though Dean had updated the brake pads in the Impala, he was a traditional guy, and hadn't put in a computer to make them anti-lock. In the rain, down a serious grade, Sam had felt like he was driving a semi instead of a sedan. His forearms still ached from it, while they sat there waiting for their mark.

Waiting in Greenwood, Maryland, just over the Pennsylvania border. Greenwood was more white than green, snow muting the starkness of the winter landscape. The house they were watching was white, cosy, two stories, with a garage and a light out front like every Christmas card you've ever seen. The front window even had a Christmas tree in it still, more than five weeks after the new year. All it needed was a dog, and maybe some reindeer in the back yard. One of the people living in that house was an apprentice electrician named Therese, and Therese was an ordinary woman, except for the part where she didn't need a current-tester to know whether a wire was live. Nestor hadn't been wrong yet.

A quarter came flying forward, over his shoulder, and pinged off the dash. Another, fuzzy this time, as if it had been stuck into gum. (As if Dean would allow gum in his car.) "I think they're in the trunk," Gertie called, and then "Wait, found one."

She sat up in the back seat with a tape in her hand, just one, and without its case. As she climbed forward again (Doc Martens flying everywhere) she asked, as if casually, "Your brother isn't really dead, is he?"

Sam listened to the bad radio and thought about what to say. She waggled the tape in front of his nose: Pink Floyd. It was the Pink Floyd tape that had been missing ever since Sam had had a shouting argument with Dean about whether "Money" was a waste of six minutes and 23 seconds. It was Sam who had tossed it into the back seat, and it had somehow wormed its way into a very secure hiding place. Dean was the one who had bought that tape, when he was thirteen or fourteen, when you could still buy tapes in music stores. Gertie held it in her hand.

Which meant, there wasn't much point in lying to her. "We don't speak to each other," he told her at last. "I took his name and sent him someplace safe. Don't worry about it."

"So you're not Dean," she said, sulky. "What's your real name?"

"Better you think of me as Dean all the time," he said. "It's safer for both of us, and for him."

Gertie thought about that one, her mouth drawn down. The tape flipped in her hands, again and again. She could glean anything she wanted from that tape, including Sam's opinion of it. She could probably have told if Dean had had it playing when he skipped out of highschool classes to hunt with Dad.

"These hunter people. Like, you grew up with them?"

"Well, my dad. He was kind of a lone wolf."

The tape went into the tape deck. It started up in the middle of something -- Sam had forgotten he had popped it out mid-song. Gertie kept her fingers on the radio and her lips pursed. After a while she asked, "Would your dad have tried to kill us?"

"Hell no," Sam protested. "He knew what I am. Probably better than I did, better than I do now. It didn't matter to him --" He stopped, not sure quite what Dad had thought of him, in the end.

Gertie nodded, not like she believed him but like she knew that was what he would say. Sam blinked suddenly and fumbled in his things for Dad's journal. "You don't have to take my word for it. Here, touch." He held the journal out in his hand, loose pages sticking out from under the leather cover. Gertie looked at it for a long time before resting her hand on top of it, as if she were swearing on a Bible.

She cried out at once, and snatched her hand away. "He started that right after your mom died."

"Oh. Yeah. Sorry," Sam added. "He was kind of -- forceful. And pissed off." Sam heard himself, and realized he must really be turning into Dean: he was defending his father's reputation. "Hey," he asked, suddenly shy. "If you -- could you touch the book again, and find out something specific about him?"

Gertie eyeballed him, wary. "What do you want to know?"

"He handled this book not long before he died. I wondered --" It was an awkward thing to say. It was an awkward thing to say to somebody who was already scared of him, of their shared world, of the dangers of the road. "I know he died to save us, me and my brother. I don't know exactly what he did. It's something that's bugged both of us for a long time. I really want to know."

With a frown on her face, she reached out again, carefully this time, as if the journal would sting her fingers. She took ahold of its spine, wrapping her thumb over Sam's hand, and stared hard, trembling, at the object she was decoding. He was pretty sure she didn't notice the tears that filled her eyes.

"Jesus H. baldheaded Christ," she said, and her voice shook. "He had the book in his hands, and he thought to himself, _I'll go to Hell before I let you mess with my boys._ " She let go just as Sam dropped his hand; the journal bounced on the seat between them. Gertie got a good look at Sam's face. "And till I met you, I didn't know anybody who would take that literally," she joked thinly.

To ease her incipient freakout, Sam knew he should laugh and joke back in kind. He ran his hand over the journal's cover, and could not muster a lie. He could not muster any words at all, just the clamoring despair of having it confirmed: Dad in Hell. A world of fire, maybe, or maybe just a ceiling of it, watching his wife crisp above his head forever. It came on Sam in waves of horror: every description of Hell he'd ever heard, the shock of hearing his dad's voice break as he begged for Sam to kill him with the Colt and end it all. His ruthless surety, that bullish, stupid endurance of him. It was unbelieveable, beyond the pale, and that meant it was something Dad really would do.

The car coming up the street allowed him not to have to think about it any more, for a little while. He let out a long breath and pointed it out to Gertie: a welcome distraction for them both. It was a stodgy car, a Buick or something, he couldn't tell from this far. It pulled into the driveway and the woman they were looking for got out. She dashed toward the house, clutching her backpack to her chest, and waved goodbye from under the covered porch as the car backed out. She looked just like Nestor had predicted: leggy, athletic, a cloud of frizzy dark hair around her head, ready smile. Sam felt a little pang suddenly, wondering how their presence might screw up her little life.

"Hey," Sam said at last, turning off the Pink Floyd. "If Therese turns out to be a nice girl, and you want to stay, that's okay. The road isn't for everybody."

Gertie considered, looking at him aslant as if that way he wouldn't be able to tell she was looking. "You've used that shotgun in the secret trunk, haven't you?"

He didn't even act surprised. "Yeah, and the rifle, and the crossbow. Not on people, not yet."

"Why did you tell that guy in Texas my real name?"

"So that if he quizzed you about it you wouldn't get lost in a lie. He won't tell anybody else. As soon as you're away from the car, away from me, you'll be safe." Sam paused. That sounded bad. "I mean, safer than _with_ me. I guess you and Therese will have to work together on the bad dreams."

"What if she turns out to be a helpless _girl_?"

"Nestor's up in New York City, him and a guy named Mike he wants me to talk to. That's where I'm headed eventually."

"I've never seen New York City," Gertie said, wistful. She tugged at the edges of her sleeves, nervous. Sam already knew she would be staying with Therese, or buying a bus ticket south to stay with Shaniece for a while.

He told her: "I've never seen New York City either, not up close. This will be my first time."


	7. Smoke on the Water

Sam is asleep on the chintz couch in Gainesville. It's been an exhausting day trying to wean himself from two crutches down to one. He has taken a pill, for the pain not the sedative effect. He is home alone, with nobody to care if he nods off during primetime.

Sam is dreaming. He never remembers his dreams, but this one he knows already is something that will stay with him when he wakes. It is so real, detailed, down to the smell like cold tin on the windy street. It is night. He is standing at the end of a street with buildings looming on all sides. The street ends because water begins beyond it, after a bricked walkway and an iron fence. There is a bridge looming, someplace to his right, unbelievably tall. The water is huge, a lake, a rushing ocean, but as he raises his head he sees it doesn't go on forever. On the other side, lights, tall lights like a city, huge. Like the whole world has turned into a city, and turned on all its lights to beat back the darkness. Sam has never seen anything like this, an island bristling with lights so dense, but in the dream it's familiar. Sam feels himself walk off the street and down to the brick walkway and put his hands on the fence. They're not his hands -- they're darker and squarer, short capable fingers. Sam feels the litheness of his body, the ableness of it, and backs up three steps to get a good hop when he vaults himself over the fence and into the Hudson River.

When the waters close over his head, he feels the cold in his scalp, behind his ears. His lungs burn with needing to breathe. He opens his mouth and lets the cool dark water pour in. It is the happiest decision he has ever made. He smiles as the bubbles leave him and float upward, away.

Sam wakes up trembling, tasting water on his lips. But it's salty water, just droplets of sweat, nothing. He is on a ratty couch in a crappy apartment in a college town in Florida. There is a cop show on the television just beyond his feet. The cop show is all about New York City. Unsettling as it is, it is only a dream.

Jo won't be home from the Big Bite Bar & Grill for another two hours. Irritably, Sam fumbles the remote out from between two cushions and clicks around in search of something that will not give him nightmares.

***

They met at a commuter rail station in New Jersey, because it turned out that people who lived in the city didn't necessarily own cars, and because they were all a little afraid of each other. Sam sat in the Impala in the parking lot, waiting, blowing on his hands in lieu of leaving the engine on. It was bitter cold, like he'd hardly known -- they'd always stayed southerly in the winters. A leather jacket and a sweatshirt were really not enough clothing.

Sam stuck his fingers into his armpits and tried to imagine Dean in a big puffy coat, the kind with a furry edge on the hood, and got a good laugh out of that. After a moment, he stopped laughing. Three people were walking together out of the station. They walked side by side, together, but far enough apart that any one could bolt from the others in a moment. Together, but apart. They had to be specials. One was a squat, muscular man in construction boots; the second man in a big green flannel coat; the third was a woman, long brown hair hanging from under a red pompom hat. Sam climbed out of the Impala and felt the wind bite at his neck.

The three of them noticed him instantly. He stood still and let them have a good look while they approached -- abruptly he missed Gertie terribly, and wanted her next to him. Gertie would look like an absurd butch outlaw, bomber jacket snapped closed and scarf flying in the wind. Sam wasn't sure what kind of picture he made, in his layers and his stinging, pink ears.

"I'm Nestor," said the one in the flannel coat, as they came close. Of course he would be the first one to reach out; his specialty was finding things. His hand was small and square, warm in Sam's grip. "This is Mike and Doreen." Mike was wearing one of those hats with flaps that fold down and tie under your chin. He looked pretty silly, up close. Sam wanted that hat.

"Nicetameetcha," Mike said. "It's fucken cold out. Let's find a bar."

"I --" said Doreen. She was a short woman, dark-eyed and unpretty. "I don't know."

"We won't get you drunk and sell your soul or anything," Mike joked, and Sam realized that it wasn't a joke, to Doreen.

He asked her, "What's your thing?" It seemed like a way to break the ice.

"Reading thoughts," she said, low. "Can I touch your hand? Just to be sure."

Sam chuckled a bit -- she could fold an assessment into a handshake, with nobody the wiser. "Does it even work on people like us?" he asked, and let her take his hand in both of hers. His knuckles looked ridiculous under her dainty touch. She ghosted fingertips past the silver ring.

"I don't know. Maybe not," Doreen said. She didn't say whether he was an okay guy or not.

"With you," Sam told her, "that makes eleven of us. Shaniece wants to hold a party when we get to a dozen." He pulled open the car door, and she climbed in. They all piled into the Impala and Sam set out to find someplace they could talk.

Of course there were sports bars around a commuter rail station. They had five to pick from, only a few blocks away. Mike walked right in, convivial, and ordered a pitcher for their table. The waitress didn't card them, which was just as well because Sam had three driver's licenses in his wallet. He wasn't sure he wanted all of them to know about all of his tools. The televisions showed a hockey game in progress, the players suddenly shedding their ridiculous gloves like haughty duellers and setting on each other with bare fists. Sam turned away when the first blood showed up on the ice.

"So, okay," Mike asked, pouring for all of them, "You just drive around the country where Nestor tells you?"

Nestor buried his nose in his glass. Sam answered for him, "This is the first time we've met in person, actually. We all talk it over, you know, online, and I go where we agree I'm needed. Like, an extra wing on a soccer team."

Doreen asked, "Is everybody okay still?"

They eyeballed each other around the table. "Nothing I can't handle," said Mike, but his mouth was grim. Nestor said nothing. He was round-faced, bland, with thick eyebrows and a low forehead. He was very different from what Sam had expected, talking to him online: shyer, more solitary. He kept his flannel coat on.

Sam told them, "There have been a couple that went bad. Nestor knows this part." Nestor nodded, eyes on the table. "Scott Corey was murdered, but he was going bad anyway. Andy's brother Webber was basically a sociopath, and we killed him in self-defense. There was this kid named Max, three years ago -- he's the first special I ever met -- he killed himself. So, that's three."

"Four," said Nestor suddenly. "That girl Ava."

"We don't know she went bad," Sam argued. "There are a lot of things that could have happened to her. Maybe she's a captive someplace, or in a mental hospital. We know specials aren't immune from possession."

Mike did not like this last one bit. He leaned forward on his heavy forearms and asked, "Like, pea-soup, head-in-a-circle possession?"

Sam rucked up his sleeve and showed them the scar. "Disappeared for a week, almost beat my brother to death possession. I know a place you can get charms against it."

"Charms?" Doreen asked. Her eyebrows said she thought that was a crock of shit.

"Lucky charms," said Mike, lugubrious. He pulled down his sweater to show, just below his collarbone, the top of a shamrock tattoo. He called for another pitcher and some onion rings.

"None for me," Doreen said. "And, I should probably think about going soon. I have to get back into Penn Station so I can make my train north. I live in Vermont."

"I can drive you," Sam volunteered. And it would be nice again, to have somebody in the passenger seat, if only for a little while. She didn't say no. They all sat watching hockey, frowning at the table and not at each other. Sam was rehearsing in his head the list of things Dean would say to break the ice, and discarding all of the incredibly inappropriate things on that list, when the onion rings arrived.

They were greasy and scalding hot, piled in a plastic basket: road food is blessedly the same everywhere. Sam snagged a paper napkin, unrolling utensils onto the table. They were cheap, tinny, and made tinny noises. Mike picked up the spoon. "Show you something neat," he said.

He held the spoon in one hand, by its handle. While Sam watched, the bowl of the spoon wilted and flopped to curl down around Mike's knuckles.

"Oh, awesome," Sam laughed.

"You try it. You've got a little of it in you too, right?" Mike unbent the spoon as easily as he had bent it, and handed it to Sam. Sam felt foolish, staring at a spoon, waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened.

The spoon gained a weird, watery quality as Sam looked at it. It seemed to glow, sparking rainbows and coronas, and with a jolt of pain Sam realized he was having a vision about two seconds before it struck him unconscious.

He woke on the floor, Doreen leaning over him. "No, he's awake now," she said to someone. There were a couple of strangers leaning over him, gawking. "There was MSG in those onion rings, wasn't there? He is violently allergic. This is a safety issue, you know."

Sam's eyes watered and Doreen mopped his brow theatrically. "I really am a nurse's aid," she confided. The bystanders were wandering away. "And that really looked like a seizure."

"Vision," Sam corrected her, and sat up while the world tilted around him. "This is the first one I've had since -- last summer, I guess. It's been a long while." Nestor was still in his chair, staring at him in fear. Mike knelt to help him stand, and came up with one other thing.

"Hey, good job." The spoon was in Mike's hand, bent double. Sam did not remember seeing it move.

He found an empty chair and drank the glass of water Doreen handed him. He was afraid that his skull might pop open, it hurt so bad.

"So," Doreen asked, bringing her voice down so he could hardly hear her, "what did you see?"

"I didn't see anything," Sam told her, miserable. "I don't think I've ever had one that bad." He folded his arms on the table and rested his ringing head in their cradle.

"What's the use of having a vision if you don't actually have a vision?" Mike asked, chuckling. Doreen and Nestor were not seeing the humor of the situation.


	8. Because the Night

Having been helpless in her presence, Sam was transformed from someone Doreen was not sure of into a patient. Which was just as well, because Sam felt like he'd fallen off a cliff directly into the path of a steamroller. She loaded him up with over-the-counter drugs and bundled him in the spare blanket he kept in the trunk and drove the Impala north, cursing the brakes and the lack of power steering.

"How can you drive this bucket of bolts, Dean?" she asked. "The AC's probably freon too, right?" Sam didn't know a blessed thing about air systems in classic cars, much less a classic car that had been rebuilt two years ago from scrap. "And it gets like two miles per gallon. What are you, a Republican?"

Sam rearranged his cheek against the seat-back and didn't answer. Really, she didn't need much in the way of response from her audience, just consciousness. She had pulled over three times for no discernible reason, till the third time she turned on the dome light and Sam realized she was checking his pupils for equality and reactivity to light. He had nursed both father and brother through concussions, and knew the drill.

The turn signal ticked as she directed the car towards an offramp. It was a rest stop, alone in the darkness of upstate New York, surrounded by pine trees. The neon signs reflected uneasy colors onto the cloud cover above.

"Gas," Doreen said, to Sam's unvoiced query. "And I have to pee like forever." He sat up, rubbing his face, just enjoying her presence and her bossy practicality.

He pumped gas while she tramped inside, boots squeaking over new snow. Swiping the credit card at the pump, Sam glanced around himself and saw nobody -- no attendant or cashier, nobody in the few cars parked in the lot. The lights were on, golden arches and all, so somebody had to be inside. But it felt like standing alone on the surface of the moon.

Doreen came out again after a little while, with a cardboard holder of drinks. "Coffee," she reported. "Drink up. Caffeine helps the ingredients in the painkillers. I didn't know how you liked it," she added, awkward. She set the drinks down on the hood of the car and he tore sugar packets, like a drug habit. The coffee was scalding, sour, burnt. It was awesome.

They climbed back into the car and moved it over to the lot, to sit and drink coffee and eat greasy french fries and recover from highway hypnosis. Dean didn't much go for dinner in the car; he always went for the sit-down meal. Probably because there were no waitresses to leer at, in the car. The front seat was full of the blessed smell of grease and their contented chewing.

"Where are we?" Sam asked at last. The caffeine had found its way into the cockles of his brain.

"Just shy of Saratoga Springs. We can make my place in an hour or so, I think. You're coming out of it," she commented. Doreen stuck a hand under his jaw and tugged his face left and right, looking him over carefully. "Visions sound like a cross between a tonic-clonic event and a nightmare."

"I did used to have them as nightmares," Sam told her. He liked the warmth of her hand on his face, and was sorry when it withdrew. "Then they moved into the day. But my nightmares were always things that ended up happening, not like -- what everybody talks about."

Doreen grunted, staring out the windshield. It was fogging up from their breath and body heat, with the engine off. In this empty parking lot, this late at night, the line of pine trees seemed primeval, the border of some gigantic forest, another country. The deciduous trees among the needles were naked, withered piles of sticks. Nothing moved -- no birds, no night-creatures -- foreboding or peaceful Sam couldn't say.

"Tell me what they're like?" he asked. "Your nightmares."

She sat back, her long hair loose over her shoulders. She breathed in and out, calming exercises. "It sounds stupid when I say it out loud." He was opening his mouth to tell her different, but she barreled forward anyway. "I'm at my job, and I'm helping out a patient. It's a different person every time. Their eyes turn yellow, and they can see right through me. I'm helping to turn somebody or listening to complaints about how grandchildren never visit, and then it's like I shrivel up into a prune. That look lays me bare, and I can't hide anything, and I feel so small."

Sam watched the middle button on her shirt jump, as her heart underneath it pounded furiously. He could see down her cleavage, just the edges of her bra and the tops of her breasts, creamy white.

"That's pretty much it," she concluded. "Sometimes the yellow-eyed person tells me I suck outright, and sometimes he just laughs. Every once in a while, I dream that I've made a mistake and killed somebody and then the yellow eyes are in the head of an accusing relative."

She did not cry; Sam had been expecting her to cry. She twisted her hands together in her lap, as if waiting for him to say something. Sam didn't know he was going to do it till it was done: he leaned in to her and kissed her, just a little bit, warm lips and breath and eyelashes like the wings of a startled bird.

"Oh," mumbled Doreen, and kissed him back. He found his hand on her waist, and they kissed for a while, tongues and all, just that spark of human-ness between them flaring a little brighter. Sam had thought of her as unpretty, but flushed and grinning up at him, as she fisted his t-shirt to keep him close, she was radiant, startling, full of life. He wanted to laugh, and kissed her again instead.

He had a pretty good grasp of her breast, the fullness of it, her practical bra that restrained her body rather than made it more lovely. She inhaled against his cheek and humidity filled the car and made them both sweat. It was easy, it was kind, it was fun, it had no strings, and maybe a car wasn't totally ideal, but what the hell, right? They were eyeballing each other with the understanding that nudity was about to commence when Sam's phone rang. It was in his jeans pocket, and he let it go until it stopped, chuckling with Doreen.

"Your ring-tone is Metallica?" she asked, and pinched him on the thigh.

Before he had a chance to answer, Doreen's phone was the one ringing. Hers was a sensible model, four or five years old, and it rang like an ordinary bell. She sat up straight, the smile fading on her face, and answered it.

"Shaniece?" she said, and Sam started to pay attention. "No, he's here. He's asleep. What's the matter?" She listened and her mouth dropped open. Sam put a hand on her arm.

"Nestor's dead," she whispered.

Sam blurted, "He what?" Shaniece was talking in her ear and she repeated it to Sam.

"He left a note. He was home at nine and went to bed with his wife and she fell asleep and woke up to a suicide note."

"But we just saw him four hours ago," Sam protested.

"His wife read the note and called the cops, and then she called Shaniece to accuse her of what? Oh come on she did not say that. _Brujos del diablo_ , is that what she really said? Well, did she read you the note?" Doreen listened. "Oh, Nestor."

Sam dug through his things on the floor of the front seat and found Dad's journal. He had to hunt to find a free page, and started copying down what Doreen repeated aloud. Party time was over.

Doreen rattled off Shaniece's words, which were in turn a recitation of Nestor's last will and testament. "'I know that the world is safer without me in it. I dream night after night about the --' He said that? '-- enchanter. _Mi amor_ , I see you look at me with fear. This is the only way to keep him away from you. Ricky didn't suffer and I won't either.' That's all?"

"Who's Ricky?" Sam jostled her elbow and she stared at him, afraid. He was the practical one now. "Ask her, is Ricky the brother who drowned?"

Doreen repeated the question. "Yeah. So, you mean, he just left that and disappeared?"

"He did it in the river," Sam guessed. She put a hand to her head, warding away his speculation. He never did this -- it was a Dean thing to do -- but he slid his hand over Doreen's on her phone and took it away from her. She was not sorry to let it go. He held it to his own ear. "Shani, it's me. I have to drop off Doreen and I can be back in New York by sunrise."

"You?" asked Shaniece. He hadn't heard her voice in a while. She sounded so reasonable and calm, considering it was midnight and one of her best friends in the world was --

"If he did it to die the same way Ricky died, then he jumped in the Hudson River, right? Anyway, he would do it far from his house, to spare the wife having to see the place every day." Doreen gripped his forearm tightly, all the warmth in her gone.

"But Dean, if he's dead --"

"We need to make sure. I want to be there when his body washes up. If he's not actually dead, we need to know that now."

"Oh," said Shaniece, and it was like a cry for help.

***

On the fifteenth of March, Jo gives Sam a cane topped with a pink plastic bow. "Early birthday," she tells him, and steals away his crutch. He is just standing there in boxers and a t-shirt, blank and still half-asleep with a toothbrush in his mouth, while she climbs the kitchen counter and stashes the crutch on top of the cabinets. "Now walk."

"Yes, master," he says, and throws the plastic bow at her. She laughs hard, hard enough she has to sit down on the couch he's just been sleeping on, and clutch her middle.

"Oh, your face. That was awesome."

Sam has forgotten how to walk without a crutch. He leans against the wall, and then the table, and then the couch, edging around the room like a rat in a cellar, till he is close enough to do the other thing canes are good for: poking people. "Shift's in half an hour," he tells her, and gets in two good jabs at her hip before she grabs the cane from the other end. She is right on the edge of taking it away from him and stranding him when she remembers, like a stain on her face, that he can't get around without it.

Jo lets go and heads over to the windows, while he finishes brushing his teeth. It's that nice part of spring where it's warm enough to open the windows and not warm enough to need central air. Sam calls it Minnesota June, and it can always make Jo laugh.

She is standing there in the late-afternoon sunlight, her yellow hair like a sheaf of wheat. Her face is dreamy, wistful, but she quickly puts that away in favor of mischief. "I got you something else," she tells him, and goes bounding into her bedroom. "Come on!" she calls.

He feels out the cane as he makes his way down the short hall to her room. He's got respect; he doesn't go into her room much. He's got a cold sweat when he makes it to the doorway, and thinks he'll probably have to ask her to get down the crutch, just for a little while, to make the transition smooth. Jo sees him in the doorway and swoops up to him wearing not-very-much and mashes something cardboard onto his head.

"What the hell is that?" he asks, pulling it off. It is a top hat, of course, from a novelty store. "James Bond I am not," he grumbles, and drops it onto her head.

"Not James Bond, you moron. I couldn't afford the sword stick," Jo laughs, and turns away. He watches her paw through her dresser drawers, and pull out her work-shirt. She doesn't even glance at him as she shucks off her t-shirt and pulls the other one on over her bra. Probably people who live together just do that, just get used to each other and forget, but Sam screws his eyes shut all the same. Once you've seen that your roommate doesn't shave her pubes, it's kind of a hard detail to unsee.

He stands there in her bedroom doorway like a tollbooth, awkwardly shifting his weight around on the new cane. Jo tugs on her tight jeans, for the tips she says, and tucks it all together so it's presentable. She is brushing her hair in her mirror, the kind of rough strokes that make static in a colder climate. Carefully, Sam turns and pulls the door shut. With the cane. It's a pretty cool toy for that kind of thing.

He fixes her a sandwich while she's cleaning herself up, and she comes into the kitchen and wolfs it down.

"I'm going out tonight after work," she announces, and fetches her jacket from the kitchen. It's not actually cold enough to need a jacket, and anyway that jacket is way more bulky than it needs to be. She isn't taking her purse with her.

Sam looks her up and down, that truculent frown on her face and her practical boots. "Don't go tiptoeing around me," he says. "You want to go hunt, that's fine." Well, not fine, but -- probably inevitable.

A blink, another. She was expecting him to argue. "Okay."

"Know what you're up against? Research beats the hell out of getting lost in a graveyard."

"Just some ordinary angry ghost stuff. I think I can handle it," she says. "Guy back around the murders, in '91, got so paranoid he shot his wife coming home with the groceries. Right on the front step. And then he realized what he'd done and went inside and did himself, in the kitchen." She is pointing one finger at her own forehead, above the left eyebrow.

"You should have a partner," he starts, but Jo has thought this out and is opening her mouth to explain how she can handle herself. "No, not me, I can't fucking walk. Just, it's not safe to do it alone. I was never as good alone as I was with Dean."

That comes out rawer than he means it to, and they stare at each other awkwardly for a minute. Sam thinks about offering her his extra knife, but he remembers in time about that tiny one from her father. There's nothing else he can tell her.

"Be careful," he says. She turns to go, flicks a glance down at his Frankenstein knee. She's got a look of shame on her face as she closes the door behind her.

He makes his careful way back to the couch and stretches out for an evening of pretending he's not worried in front of some quality American television. He clicks all the way around the dial, including taking time to scoff at the cop shows, and is restless again before her shift is half over.

Sam clambers to his feet to practice with the cane, up and down the hallway, get in some work if he can't get in some sleep. He distracts himself with the sore thrumming in his knee and with twirling the cane like Huggy Bear on a coke high. And actually, he does a pretty good job at that -- he only knocks one picture frame off the wall, and keeps himself busy for a whole hour putting it back (including a sweaty quest under the sink for a hammer) pretending he isn't waiting for Jo to get home.

He paces into her bedroom, looks through the girly crap on her dresser, and discovers that she does have pink glitter nail polish, although she has only ever worn the black in his presence. He snoops in her closet for her slutty clothes and finds a remarkable shortage of leather, vinyl and low-cut slinky things. He sits on her bed and smells her smell in the room. He snags the ragged gray teddy bear from off her pillow and beats the everliving crap out of it.

Sam's done with that and feeling vaguely foolish when the footsteps come bouncing up the stairs. Jo sounds like a herd, like somebody who's so pumped up on killing the undead that she can't stand still. She waltzes into the apartment, does a little spin, drops her tools in a pile on the floor. She hasn't even closed the door yet and she's blabbing to Sam about the awesome fight she won.

He stomps past her and secures the door, and she's turning him around, knocking away the cane, trying to dance with him or something, grinning ear to ear, so eager and stupid and happy. There's a glow to her, vigorous pink though she must be exhausted, and she jostles him hard enough he loses his balance and she has to grab him so he won't fall. She laughs and after a second he laughs too, reaching up and touching the ashes in her hair.

"Nothing like it in the world, is there?" says Sam, full of envy.

"Yeah," she breathes, and then moves _really_ into his space and kisses him. Her fingertips on his cheekbones and her tongue in his mouth and he's suddenly tingling all over. She lets him go but doesn't back away and he's got a hand on her hip that he doesn't remember putting there. "Wow."

They're temple-to-temple, circling each other, not quite ready to try again. "Yeah," says Sam. "Wow."

Jo closes her eyes and leans into him.

"This is a bad idea," says Sam, and closes the distance again. He likes her low shoulders, how her boots give her a little height so he doesn't have to lean over too far. He explores her back and finds his way up into her hair, pulling at it gently, letting it out of the braid that keeps it away from her face. She chuckles into his mouth, like he's given something away, while he works his fingers into her scalp and collects the satisfied mumbles that draws out of her. He's leaning against the door and she's leaning against him and surely by now she can tell he's interested.

A tug at his waist, fingers hooked in the beltloops of his jeans. "Come on," she says, while he's still wrapping his brain around _girl has her fingers on my belt_ , and she laughs at the look on his face. Instantly she repents, cocking her head. "You need the cane?"

"Yeah, just," he protests. "Just -- go light some candles or whatever, and I'll be in in a sec." He catches a handful of her jacket and drags her in for an exclamation mark on the end of that one, and then lets go and watches her crouch to fetch him his third leg. She peels off the jacket as she heads into her bedroom. He follows, limping awkwardly, desperately cataloguing where on earth he last stashed a condom. He sure hopes she's got one.

Jo hasn't lit any candles in her bedroom, but she has managed to get off her stomping boots and is sitting there on the bed in her jeans, legs apart casual-like, like she isn't especially thinking of his fitting between them but maybe she'll be accommodating. He hangs out a second in the doorway, just looking at her and at the room and at the grungy clothes in the corner and the little things on the dresser that say this is Jo's room. She looks up at him and smiles, and he can come in after that, and hobble on over to her bed and topple her over onto the blanket with him on top.

He's done it a hundred times in the past, but never with a bum leg. Landing on the bed he bangs his knee and sees fireworks behind his eyelids, and has no idea who's under him or where he is for that matter. He hears the rough breathing in his ears, feels the teeth clenched tight, and then realizes that's _his_ breathing, those are _his_ teeth. Jo is beside him, sitting up, rolling him over. She inches him onto his back while he fights tears and her hands are everywhere: at his waist, over his heart, in the collar of his t-shirt, lacing in his fingers. Her breath is warm on his cheek and she kisses him and after a little bit he can open his eyes again.

"Sorry," she says, but she's got this smile on her face like she's not worried overall about what kind of shape his body is in. There's this conspiratorial look she gets on her face sometimes, and she's got it now. She lowers her head, lips pursed like they're swollen, and bites his earlobe. She whispers, "I could always ride you like a pony." She's already clambering all over him, draping herself on his body, hot and firm.

There's this thing, where girls have collarbones, and they hollow out under the bra straps. It's the perfect place for nosing your way under a t-shirt, getting in a good lick at that long white neck. "Yee haw," he tells her.


	9. Pride and Joy

Arizona in April was a far cry from New York City in February. For one thing, it was warm, during the day at least. Sam had on only the leather jacket, no layers. For another, everything was green, for a little while at least, before the summer dry season kicked in. Sam was alone again, and alone he walked up the tidy front walk and rang the doorbell.

It was a quiet town, one of those flat, spread-out suburbs of Phoenix, far enough out to the south and west that it looked kind of like Mexico. The rest of the neighborhood was old people too, but a younger version of old and out hiking the desert trails or whatever retired people did. Sam had seen cactus blooms, on his way into town.

A tiny old black woman answered the door, stooped and frazzled with sagging eyelids. She had on a paper-thin cotton dress from a style a generation old, and fit her callused feet into shapeless house slippers. "That nice young lady said you'd be here," she said, showing her pink and white dentures. "Binney's over by the window, he likes the night air. I'm Martha."

She showed Sam into the apartment, which was tidy in that limited way: Martha swept, surely, and dusted the surfaces she could reach; the pictures high on the wall and the upper panes of the windows showed she had nobody to help her. There were a lot of pictures, in matching frames. Children, and grandchildren. Lots of them, smiling for the camera.

There was a chair by the window, with somebody in it. Scuff marks on the carpet said that chair was always there, and there was always someone in it. Sam came around to meet Binney Washington.

"Mr. Washington?" he asked. He crossed his legs and sat on the floor, like a kid at a school assembly. "My friend Shaniece contacted you? Or your wife Martha, I guess. She had to do a lot of research and a little magic to find you, sir. There's some things I'd like to ask you about." Binney sat still, face towards the skyline. They were far enough out in the country that it was really just brush and stars, all the way out, till the twinkling lights of the highway far in the distance.

Martha came and wrestled a kitchen chair close. "This is about Spuyten Duyvil you want to know?"

Sam startled. "You know about that?"

"Course," said Martha, fussing as she sat. "We don't have secrets, young man. We got married when we was twenty-one. Everything bright in the future, then -- it was civil rights, you ever learn about that in school?"

Sam supplied what Shaniece had told him: "1958."

"We met in fifty-four, though, at a fundraiser for Bayard Rustin's defense. He was in jail in California, just then. Trumped-up charges. Binney and I were both in college, you know that? He thought I should have a job and a life more than just housewifing. That was radical, then. We were both radical." The man in the chair had not stirred; he sat with his closed eyelids to the stars, silent.

"How did Mr. Washington find out about the --" Sam had no idea what to call being marked, psychic, doomed, special. "--his special ability?"

"It came on sudden, in fifty-six I think. He had headaches, you know, and then the Touch came to him. He could persuade anybody of anything. Helped a lot of fundraisers that way, you know. We were members of CORE, and we had to send every penny to help the boycott, down in Montgomery. And then, well."

Binney shifted in his seat. "Why you telling this child about the Touch, Martha?" His eyes were still closed, and Sam wondered suddenly whether he was blind.

"The nice young lady told why, you crazy old man." Martha swatted him on the forearm, and he twitched back. "They got it too, both this nice white boy and the young lady, and they need to know."

"Know what," asked Sam.

The old man drew a breath that lifted his shoulders so he looked young again, for a moment. "The bad man came in my dreams, boy. In my dreams. With eyes like a monster and flames shooting out his mouth. I'd wake up in a sweat." Martha crossed her arms, as if it still unnerved her. Binney put his hand on her knee without ever turning his head. Sam, looking up at him from the floor, saw him twist his mouth as if steeling himself. "I was crazy, those months. I drank to make him go away, but while I was under something took over my limbs, made me do things. I stopped drinking after that, been dry fifty years now."

Martha was looking at the floor. Sam didn't want to wonder what things he'd done.

"I faced the bad man in my dreams, and I spat in his eye and told him he got no right. And then he come in life, in the form of a man knew too much about me, come right up to me on the subway platform one night, scared me white. Begging your pardon," he added. Sam waved him onward. "I saw him in life ten times after that, always somebody I didn't know, who knew me. I knew he was going to take me, hurt my Martha, ruin the future we had planned. So I planned some more, found out about some things, and I fought that bad man, right out in the open, on midsummer's night in nineteen fifty-eight."

Sam sat, rapt.

"I had garlic and yams in my pockets, and virgin rock from a closed quarry tied round my neck. I had silver pins in the collar of my shirt, and tin buttons, and steel in a bracelet around my wrist. I had the salt and the pepper-dust and them damn crazy paint-marks on my face the Haitian doctors said brought the ancestors. I had a top hat, cause a Jamaican woman told me Death wears a top hat. I had every damn tool I could think of or learn about, and none of them made a damn bit of difference, do you know? That wasn't what let me fight."

"There were fireworks over the Harlem River Shipping Canal that night," Sam supplied. "That's what drew Shaniece's attention, when she was looking for somebody like you."

"Sparks of evil flying off, is what. I went there cause it was a splitting of rivers, and that's powerful, and cause it was close-by to home. Back a century past, it was Spuyten Duyvil Creek. I went there and stood at water's edge and called that bad man. I threw everything I had at him, and it bounced off into the sky like sparks."

Sam watched that impassive old face, triple lines around the mouth and the watery, sunken gaps where eyes should be. He had a couple of tears on his face, but his voice was steady.

"I fought him with weapons, and when the weapons didn't work, I fought him with tools, and when the tools broke I fought him with anger, and when my anger did nothing I fought him with the only thing I had left, and that was the love of my wife Martha. I called up a picture of her in my mind and I took a knife to my own flesh, ready to die so he'd leave her alone. That was when he backed away, child. That was when." He lifted his hand from his wife's knee, pulled back the sleeve. There were old scars there, awful ones, vertical from wrist to elbow. "He took my eyes, out of spite, but he couldn't take my soul. And he left me there to die, but I didn't, and here I am."

Martha had been crying quietly. "I found him in the water, face down." An image bloomed in Sam's mind, of Nestor's body as it had looked when it washed up on Staten Island. How the fish had nibbled at him, how he'd swollen and turned purple from the cold water. Sam suppressed a shudder. Martha was saying, "I didn't know if he was dead already, but I took him to the white people's hospital. Ten years before, they might have turned him away. But they didn't. They helped him live."

"So," Sam conjectured, "you fought him to a draw."

The old man thundered. "Child, I lived fifty-one years of life without dreaming that bad man ever again. I don't need no eyes to see my Martha. If that's a draw then I don't know nothin bout victory."

Sam let that settle into his brains. It sounded kind of like a recipe for success. Kind of a drastic one, but -- surely they all had someone they would die for. At least that would make the demon go away, even if it didn't do anything against his coming back to the next generation.

"You see the bad man, child?" asked Binney, slow.

"I have," said Sam. "Couple of times now. He doesn't get in my dreams; I have visions. Twice, he's come in person."

"Now you know," said Martha. She dabbed at her eyes with a cotton handkerchief, and smiled. "Now you go on back and tell that nice young lady Shaniece. It's the kind of story you got to tell in person; no phone will do."

"Yes, ma'am," said Sam, and stood up. He turned to go, paused. "How come you called it Spuyten Duyvil Creek? Instead of the Harlem River Shipping Channel? Does it mean something to you?"

"Old Dutch name," Binney said. "From way back, when white people first came to the city. It means _Spite the Devil_."


	10. Born to Run

"I guess I just lost the feel for it," Sam says, which is the truth. His instincts are telling him that parking in an empty field far outside the city in the late evening demands a sixpack and an arm around his girl, and maybe some necking as the sun goes down, but that is definitely not what is going on. In the purple gloaming he is prepping the night-scope on the rifle and hoping it is dark enough to use. There will be no sixpack this evening.

Jo's voice comes tinny out of the radio by his side. "You don't just _lose the feel_. I thought this is the only life you've ever known."

"Well," Sam allows, "there's a reason I bugged out and ended up at Stanford, you know. I wanted a normal life."

Jo has nothing to say to that. He raises the rifle to see her through the scope, a dull fuzzy patch in the night. She's forty or fifty yards off, not far, pacing her way through the old graves in search of the right one over which to burn a four-generations-old wedding dress and salt the earth where the ashes fall. It's kind of funny to watch with the naked eye, yards and yards of puffy white silk luminous in the early night like a cloud of moths, flopping around in Jo's arms as she carries it. He is pretty sure he has never seen her in a dress at all. It is possible she doesn't feel good how her legs look (they are glorious), but mostly, Sam is pretty sure that growing up with her mother knocked the impractical right out of her. Pity.

"Heads up," she mutters into her radio, and Sam settles the rifle at the ready. "Found the place." He raises the scope again and can see her crouch in front of the proper grave. The name on it is Crawley, husband and wife, with space enough for three daughters but only two of the spaces occupied. The third Crawley daughter married someone unsuitable (and by unsuitable, mom and pop meant black), and stole her mother's wedding dress to do it in, and got cast out of the family entirely, except for the curse that's been driving her female descendants mad for the last hundred years. Those old ranchers knew how to discipline their kids. Jo lays the dress on the grass, spread out like you might on a bed while packing a suitcase, and the wind blows a little and seems to fill it, the skirts swishing and the bodice billowing as if a body wore it.

Sam clicks his radio to speak. "Better hurry. Grandma's thinking about manifesting."

Jo makes a rude noise and pulls out flint and steel. The sparks fall on the dress like rain, and though he can't hear it, he can see her lips forming the cast for dispersal. Little black holes appear in the silk, bigger now, the fabric seeming to retreat the way hair burns back away from a candle. The bodice of the dress sits up and the arms wave themselves, batting at the flames while they catch.

Fire casts an orange glow on Jo's features. She jerks back her head, whipping her ponytail out of danger, and fumbles in her pockets for a weapon.

Sam barks, "Back up, babe." He puts the rifle firmly to his shoulder and fires, first at the far sleeve and then as Jo steps to a safe distance the nearer one as well. In tatters, the sleeves whip and bat and only fan the flames that are catching now everywhere, crisping the skirts and revealing the layers of petticoat underneath.

Now something rears up, a wisp in the darkness, and he can't see it at all through the scope. Sam dashes the rifle away from him, cursing, and shuffles off the roof of the car, careful to land on his left leg. There's Jo, a pale figure against the horizon, and she's got something in her hand now, arcing it back and forth in front of her, while the last dregs of the curse fight for their existence. Sam runs for her, bellowing her name, but he only makes twenty yards before the bum knee fails on him and he goes down on his face in the long grass.

Up on his elbows, Sam is just in time to see Jo toss a handful of salt at that shadow. She's fast, he has to admit it: she drops the salt box and cuts more sparks, that spring down the dress's cleavage and into the body of it. It's fully engulfed now, and the shadow withers and disappears. Slowly the dress collapses as if under its own weight, the curse bleeding out of it. Soon the dress is down to ashes and filmy black smoke in the air, and Jo is ready with the salt box again, for double-sure. She turned out not to need him after all, this time.

She tramps back to where he is lying in the grass, and waits while he pulls himself back up to his feet, tender on the bad knee. "You have grass stains on your forehead," Jo tells him, and laughs, delighted. "How can you not love this shit?"

"I don't love you being in danger," he tells her, and they wade through the whispering grasses back to the car. She's pretty good about staying in arm's reach without actually making it obvious that she expects him to collapse at any minute. Jo stows the salt and the flint while he takes the gun apart, fitting the pieces neatly into their case. He pulls back the hidden flap in the back seat cushion and settles the case in next to a hatchet and a coil of rope. Damn car isn't big enough for a true false-trunk, unless Sam's willing to lower the undercarriage clearance to about three inches.

"I'm driving," she calls softly. "You get to charm our grateful customers." Sam spins around and there she is, hands on hips, grinning at him like the world is new. He pulls himself to his feet, leaning only a little on the car door. He catches her waist with his hands and her lips with his mouth.

"You can talk to me in Latin any night," he mutters. "It doesn't even have to be dirty. Just pretend it's dirty. I won't know the difference." He's got his fingers down the curves of her shapely butt, pressing their bodies together, and Sam is wondering whether tonight is the night he'll get lucky in a graveyard for the first time.

Jo is charmed, but not charmed enough to disrespect the dead. "Perv." She dances out of the span of his arms and into the driver's seat. "You coming?"

"I hope so," he tells her, and slings himself into the passenger seat. She drives them out into the night, through the empty countryside and back toward the lights of Gainesville. The stars are up now, in the east, and it's a beautiful summer night.

"Call up the client," Jo reminds him, and Sam fumbles his phone out of his pocket.

"Hi, is this Luke?" Sam asks. "We just got done. Did Diane come out of it?" Luke Burnham has got bags and bags of money, retired though he's not old enough to go out to pasture. He has showed them the wedding pictures, Diane in the antique dress grinning ear to ear. She lost her mind only a few months ago, after seven years of marriage. Not exactly the 'sickness and in health' either of them was expecting. He loves her enough to find out what's really wrong, instead of just locking her up and throwing away the key.

There's a fumble on the other end of the line, as Luke unlocks a door. "Baby?" he calls. "Baby, it's me. Are you okay?" Sam glances at Jo as she navigates the butt-ugly car over a canal bridge, smiling that tough-girl smile. In his ear there's some sobbing, Luke mumbling, "Diane, Diane, baby, it's me." After a second, it becomes clear that it's Diane doing the sobbing. Luke puts down the phone and talks to her, rhythmic and slow, and starts sobbing himself. "It's okay, baby, we're safe, it's okay, baby."

"I'll call back," Sam tells nobody, and closes the phone. He toys with it, turning it over in his hands. "Sounds like it worked." Jo glances over at him, just acknowledging she's heard. He doesn't want to look at her.

"I was thinking," he says to himself, slowly. It's a weird conviction that has come over him, like birds needing to migrate or like a rabbit freezing in a wide-open field. It's hard to explain it. "I was thinking, that might be my last case for a while."

When Jo is freaking out, she doesn't stomp on the brakes. She drives faster. Luckily they're still pretty far outside the city. "You are serious about this retiring thing? What the hell's got into you? I just got _started_ ," she whines.

"I just." Sam turns the phone over in his hands again. His thoughts jumble over in tandem, like clothes in a dryer. "I guess I did what I set out to do. You know, the whole demon thing. And now that that's over, I just feel like, like I have to get over it, settle down, live the life I'd been trying to have before."

That gets a big blank silence. Of course: Jo never met him before he was on the road.

"I was applying to law school, when it happened. The thing with -- Jess." He finds himself mumbling, as if the whole _I had a girlfriend who spontaneously combusted_ thing were embarrassing. He has put it out of his mind so firmly that he can hardly remember Jess's face, just the Smurf t-shirt she used to sleep in. "I don't know if I could do law school now, I mean, I'd have to fake up an awful lot to pass a background check, but, I was thinking maybe I'd at least finish college."

"You," Jo says. "Want to finish college?"

"I was only a couple of classes shy of a degree," he protests. "I'd have to hack my old records for transfer credits, but I could finish up in six months, tops. Doesn't have to be Gainesville," he adds. "We could hit Miami, or Atlanta, or hey, have you ever been to California?"

"You don't like hunting?" she asks, as if he's just told her he doesn't like to breathe.

"I don't --" If he launches into some kind of speech about how birds just _know_ it's time to head south he really will sound like an idiot. "I just don't want to do it any more. I went to college to get away from all that, you know? I want to be safe."

"Well I guess you have to keep hunting, for now." She gives him her checkmate look. "Cause I'm not ready to retire. And I need you around to keep _me_ safe."

"Oh, come on."

"Come on, yourself. You can quit if you want, and I'll just leave you behind and go out alone."

The idea of her going out alone bugs him so much he can't even explain it to her. Like a rabbit in a wide-open field, and the hawk circling high. "That is dirty pool, woman." He flicks her hard on the thigh with a forefinger.

She takes a hand off the wheel and flicks him back, in the ribs. "I thought you liked dirty." Jo is laughing, so he plays along and laughs too.

"Well, there's that." Sam rests his hand on her leg, and lets it wander upward. She is an amazing driver, navigating the night streets with the buttons of her jeans coming undone. They don't speak, just listen to each other breathing hard, while Sam gets his fingers sticky. It's kind of a shame when she pulls into the parking lot of their building and kills the engine.

They tumble into the apartment and she pushes him back on the bed as if she can tell the leg is sore. Leaning over him in the darkness, she is confident, awesome, fearless. It scares him, to see her so reckless. He grabs the front of her shirt to bring her close enough for kissing so he won't have to look at her face.

Jo is almost naked and yanking at his jeans when she disappears suddenly, the bed instantly colder. Sam snaps his eyes open and she hasn't gone far; she's just at the bureau rummaging in a drawer. He peels his jeans the rest of the way off and drops them on the floor while she paces back towards him. "Where'd you go?" he asks, trying to make it a joke.

A condom packet smacks him on the chest. "Need to go grocery shopping. That's the last of my emergency stash," she says, and strips off her panties while she stands in front of him. That's a beautiful sight, and he doesn't say a thing at first, just looks his fill while she grins at him. She crawls onto the mattress, her hot fingers everywhere, and he wishes he had more hands. Long hair trails over his ribs, up his chest, ghosting over his neck. He leans up to kiss her again, but she's pretty intent on that condom. She struggles to rip the package open, and he feels her frustrated laughter where her breasts are pressed against him.

"Just don't leave," he finds himself whispering. He says it into her hair and her temple and then to empty air, as the thing rips finally and she sits up to get down to business. "Just don't leave me. Just stay."


	11. Wanted Dead or Alive

Sam was paranoid all the way up the peninsula, until he arrived in San Francisco proper. At that point he could let the familiar frustration of trying to find parking take him over, and pretend he wasn't worried that someone would recognize him. It was even harder finding parking for a car as gigantic as the Impala.

At last he found a spot in a kind of run-down neighborhood, south of Golden Gate park near the hospital, so he could walk to the teahouse where he was meeting Melvin. Sam parked next to the curb, nudging trash out of the way as he pushed forward into the space, and he got out of the car and looked it over. It had its own kind of warding magic, that Dean must have done, or Dad years before. It sat there proud on the street, gleaming a little despite the cloud cover, as badass as ever. Sam felt okay leaving it by itself on this street.

The teahouse was two blocks west, and Sam walked with his hands slung into his pockets and a growing realization he had forgotten how to be in a city. He eyed the tops of four- and five-story buildings, as if in broad daylight something evil might leap down on him. Every homeless person might have been a vessel for a demon. There were so many people, and he couldn't look every direction at once. It was starting to rain: a typical dispiriting September in the microclimate.

For all its neighborhood, the teahouse turned out to be a refuge, painted balmy apple green inside, with stripes. Sam was early. He found a seat and read the menu, dumbfounded at the number of teas to choose from. He had forgotten this too -- he had clear memories of knowing these yuppie distinctions, but it was foggy, far-off, like another life. The waiter was muscular and pierced, with hair standing straight up. Sam turned on his borrowed charm and asked for recommendations.

The waiter had just gone into the back (possibly planning his proposal of marriage) when Melvin arrived. He was not oblique or subtle, as Sam had invited him to be by being early himself; Melvin just opened the door and walked in and walked right up to Sam. "You're Dean Winchester?" he asked.

"Yeah," said Sam. It was still a little shamefully thrilling to hear that name; it had been his for almost a year and still he felt the way he had when he was fifteen and other ninth graders had asked him, awed, whether his older brother had really bagged Mrs. Highland from homeroom. Sam mastered himself and invited Melvin to a seat.

Melvin was a slim, knobby man, with very dark black skin. His whole head was a knob on his skinny neck, and his ears stuck out, and he wore his hair in the low-set lumps of cornrow braids. Plastic glasses, subtly round, balanced on his nose. There was something elegant about the way he carried himself, something fastidious, as if he had learned to walk with a book balanced on his head. Sam thought that in another time he would be the sort to wear bowties. But Melvin was a first year medical resident, so he was actually wearing ugly green scrubs and clogs and an unbuttoned sweater about five sizes too wide for him. It billowed around him, woolly protection.

They did not shake hands. The waiter bustled back in, bringing a ceramic teapot for Sam, and his face fell comically as he took in Melvin's arrival. Melvin didn't need to look at the menu to put in his order.

"I come here all the time," he said. He folded his long-fingered hands in front of him on the table, waiting. He was going to make Sam do the work of this conversation.

"I don't know how much Shaniece told you," Sam started. "She's not a finder herself; she's just been pressed into that job recently. You're the first new one we've found."

Melvin was impassive. "First one of what?"

"With you, we're back up to eleven. I guess, if you're a doctor, you would want a demonstration, right?" Sam saw Melvin nod his head, so barely it might not have been conscious. "Okay, I've only done this once before. So bear with me."

Sam took up the spoon that had come with his tea in one hand. He stared at it, intent but not demanding, and gave it the picture that was in his head, from New Jersey, when Mike had made a spoon wilt like a tulip. The spoon in Sam's hand did not lie down as requested, but it did curl to the right, just a little, just out of true. Melvin watched, unblinking.

The waiter swept back into the room and deposited Melvin's tea at his elbow. He noticed Sam's attention on the spoon and asked, enthusiastic, "Do you want a new one? I have more in the back, fresh out of the washer. Bigger? smaller?"

"No," said Sam, snapping himself out of the spoon mindset. "No, this one is fine."

"Okay. If there is anything you need, just let me know."

Sam gave him a smile that came straight from Dean (not that Dean would admit to having bestowed it on anyone of the male persuasion). The waiter floated away on a cloud of possibility.

"So you see," Sam continued, meeting Melvin's stare, "We're not making this up. We've all got skills like this, and we know you do too, and we all think we cope better together than apart."

Melvin was precise, pitiless. "What exactly do you hope to accomplish? Beyond a network of mutual appreciation."

"The ultimate goal is to find a way to make the bad man with the yellow eyes leave us alone. If we can kill him, all the better. Right now, we're trying to hold a baseline of no more suicides."

"Which is how many?"

"Two. Out of sixteen, including you. Two others are dead by other means, and one is missing."

"That's not a good survival rate."

"Don't think we all haven't thought about it."

Melvin looked around the teahouse. It was lit mellowly, small but not cramped. Sam felt his enormous size in the room, how used he was to shrinking himself to try to fit. Melvin was not tall, but seemed the same size as Sam.

"Here is what I will tell you," Melvin said at last. "I don't like people calling me out of the blue and trying to recruit me into what sounds like a cult. I don't like meeting strangers for tea and pretending to be nice to them. I don't like being thought of as a sideshow entertainer." Sam took each one of these statements onto his shoulders like a lead overcoat. He had always managed, at least, to start a contact with some kind of understanding.

"Okay," said Sam. "But --"

Melvin talked over him. "Here is what else. Have you ever done tea leaves?" Sam just gave him a blank look and Melvin smiled, something brittle. "My grandma taught me how. Look."

He swirled the teacup in his hand, once twice thrice counterclockwise, and drank down the last of it. He rested the cup in its saucer gently, so it hardly made a noise. In the bowl of the cup, tiny flecks and shreds of dried tea leaf. Sam had taken a psychology course, and knew how powerful the impulse was to see patterns, like faces, in random nonsense -- Jesus in a grilled cheese; the Virgin Mary in a bagel. In the leftover leaves of Melvin's tea was an eye, one eye, drawn as precisely as you might with a fine-tipped paintbrush. It was open, and seemed to be staring at Sam no matter what angle he looked at it from.

"Whoa," said Sam.

"I have been coming here for three years, since the beginning of medical school. I saw this sign for the first time the day after..." Melvin grimaced and poured more tea into his empty teacup, obliterating the eye. "The day after I glanced at a cadaver two tables over from me and knew the man was full of cancer. It wasn't even what he died of, but when they dissected his lungs, guess what they found."

Sam blinked. "You're a finder, aren't you?"

"I chose a residency in oncology. My guess rate for malignancy is considerably better than chance."

"We need you, Melvin. We need to find the others like us, so we can work together."

"And give up the ability to save a lot of people?"

"That's one possible outcome." Sam paused. "I don't know if you believe in the soul, but I do. And this thing, this, bad man -- he'll think up scenarios just like that. Kill this one person, and I'll save a hundred, something like that. He'll try to tempt you into damnation with your own good intentions."

The twitch of Melvin's lips indicated that Sam did not need to use the future tense.

"A side effect of being a finder, as you call it, is that I collect people. I have been corresponding with a woman at Cal Poly, down in San Luis Obispo. She is in the chemistry program there. She can... facilitate any heat reaction you might care to name. She has terrible migraines. I prescribe for her, which I shouldn't be doing."

Sam drank his tea. It was bitter on his tongue, and then when he swallowed it came sweet, a richness and a lightness, up into the back of his palate, like a feeling of accomplishment.

"Why," Melvin asked, rimming the edge of his cup with a finger, as if it might sing, "why does she get the stick, while he uses the carrot on me? Did he not think we would compare notes? Did he assume I wouldn't care about her plight?"

A deep breath, another. Sam settled in for a long talk. "I get migraines so bad I don't even remember the visions any more. They knock me right out." Melvin set down his tea, as if he might begin diagnosing on the spot. "Having no useable visions and no finder -- we've been flying blind, for a while."

"Why do the visions cause physical pain? You don't suffer when you bend a spoon, and I don't when I point to an old woman and pronounce her doom. It doesn't make sense."

Sam shrugged. "I like to think my brains are rebelling against being used as a pawn in an epic battle of good and evil."

"That's all very good, but --" Melvin paused, glancing over Sam's shoulder. Melvin gave off such a vibe of precise intentionality that watching his eyes go wide and his chair bump backwards was unsettling, to say the least. Sam knew how to take a signal from a counterpart, and threw himself sideways away from the table, while a butcher knife flashed into the space he had been in just a moment before. Elbows smarting, he scrambled across the room, cataloging his weapons, and turned in time to see Melvin be trapped in a corner.

It was the waiter, of course, pierced and with his hair standing up and with a terrible black-eyed viciousness. Sam had a gun in his hand before remembering that there was a person in there. He tucked it away and snatched up the teapot instead, smashing it on the back of the waiter's head just as he slashed again at Melvin. The waiter dropped to the floor like a sack of sugar.

"Did he cut you?" Sam asked over his shoulder, as he grabbed the waiter's wrists. "Do you have something to tie him with?"

Melvin stood half-climbing the wall still, gaping at the floor in front of him. "I'm okay," he said at last. "He's ruined the sweater. Here, use it to tie him." He stripped the cardigan off and helped Sam wind it around the waiter's arms.

Panting, Sam sat back and began the ritual of exorcism. He realized, after the first line, that he did have it memorized, and could recite the whole thing.

"What --" Melvin interjected.

Sam waved him off with a hand and completed the ritual. Smoke billowed out of the waiter's mouth like a noxious plume, whistling moans in the background, and stuck its fingers in-between the floor tiles until it was gone.

"You said it," Sam gasped, as Melvin grabbed his shoulder. "He doesn't think we should be comparing notes."

Melvin told him, "I'll give you Candy's phone number."


	12. Black Dog

The drive back to Nebraska isn't so bad, although Sam's leg is stiff. If only he'd managed to break his _left_ leg -- Jo's butt-ugly Japanese car is automatic and he could have driven it from here to Timbuktu. So they switch off every two hours, which is fine with Jo cause every once in a while she'll turn white and need to pull over and open the car door and breathe really hard. She doesn't throw up every time, but, maybe one out of four.

It's probably, in retrospect, a stupid decision to drive straight through all day from Memphis, where they spent the night, but they're discovering a pretty scary ability to leap into a decision together. They pull in to the roadhouse around closing, one in the morning, Sam getting sorer but unwilling to say anything about it because Jo's catching a little more fitful sleep with her forehead pressed against the side window. Damn those Japanese and their bucket seats.

The only cars in the lot are Ellen's pickup and one sedan from the late sixties. Hunters love cars from the sixties and early seventies, great old iron land-boats, the bigger the better. You never know when your means of transportation might turn into a weapon, and won't you be sorry if your wheel wells are made out of plastic then. Sam parks the car and sits for a minute or two, the October night air truly chilly this far north. He can't see his breath but he thinks about pulling out a blanket to cover up Jo, and then he straightens his head out and wakes her instead. They stagger inside like zombies, hollow-eyed and starving and tense.

"Oh hey, sweetie," says Ellen, and then she gets an eyeful of Jo behind him. "Jesus Christ, are you two okay?"

"Fine, Mom," Jo mumbles. "Tired."

"We weren't hunt--" Sam starts, and then thinks better of it. "Just a long drive."

Most of the chairs are up on tables. The guy at the bar gives a nod and gets himself together to go. Everybody knows not to stay when Ellen's got that cut-the-shit face on. She waits till the guy is gone before telling Sam, "So, I hear I'm supposed to call you Tommy Walker --"

"No," he says, unsmiling, "I went and changed my name again." He finds himself a barstool and Jo eases onto the one next to him while he watches.

Ellen narrows her eyes and clamps one hand to her hip. "Okay what the hell is going on," she asks.

Sam looks at Jo, and Jo looks at Sam, and they sort of shrug at each other. Jo takes the plunge like she promised to do, cause it's her mom and she's kind of scary. "So," she says, looking at the bar. Sam thinks about reaching out for her and doesn't. He goes for his wallet instead. He pulls out his new driver's license while Jo says it bluntly, "So, we got married."

"Married??" cries Ellen, dropping a glass. It bounces once, and shatters the second time it comes down. "Joanna Beth Harvelle what the hell are you talking about."

"Things happened. It was a surprise. We were so careful --" Jo is babbling and Sam is about to intervene for her when she gets to it. "We made a decision and got married last Thursday and now we're here to tell you about it."

His license makes a crisp noise as he snaps it onto the bar. Ellen doesn't even look at it, in the grip of her disbelief. "So you're _sleeping_ with him?"

Sam's cheeks are hot and he's winding himself up for something unforgivable. Jo lets out a noise of disgust. "No, I make him wear a frilly apron and cook me dinner. Mom, I've got this whole life going on, and it's not yours. And, I mean, we get along okay, we lived in my tiny apartment for months and didn't kill each other, so --"

"Anyway, we thought you should know," Sam interrupts, and watches Jo gather herself. "We were thinking about heading out to California. I've had good luck in California."

Ellen's stare is terrifying, all-knowing, old. "Jo. You're pregnant."

That's when Jo starts crying, not big whooping sobs but just a little leaky, and Sam puts a hand on her knee under the bar. His wife -- his _wife_ \-- says, "Don't be mad, Mom."

Like she has the right to be mad, but Ellen isn't, or doesn't seem to be. He moves his hand up to Jo's back, rubs her up and down as she sits there crying in front of her silent mom. Ellen sort of slumps her shoulders and asks, "When'd you find out?"

Sam is surprised, and has to count on his fingers. "She gave me the panic-look for the first time about a month ago, then four or five days later in the middle of the slasher haunting she did the test thing, and then a week after that I finally got her into a clinic at the University. I think you're at, what? About nine weeks? I asked her that first morning on the bathroom floor, but we only did the paperwork last week. They make you wait three days, you know," he falters. He plays with the ring he's wearing, that's too big on his finger because it was his father's, and Dad had fat hands -- all the time he was asking one or the other of the kids to reach him something stuck behind a stove where he couldn't fit his fingers. Jo's ring is silver, picked out at the hippies-and-college-students shop forty-five minutes before the ceremony. She let Sam pay for it, but she insisted on cash, because she wasn't going to start a marriage with a felony. Anyway, it cost only twenty bucks.

The leaky stuff is finishing up and Jo's pulling herself together and there's Ellen, hands out, grasping at her daughter's fists and then her forearms and then clutching hard on her shoulders, and she says, her forehead in furrows, neck all cords, "You can do whatever you want, Joanna Beth. You can stay here, no matter what. You don't have to go anywhere with him if you don't want to."

"What the hell," he says, aggrieved and more than a little confused, but Jo is already pulling away from her mother, wrinkling her nose like she's smelling sulfur in a graveyard, and she busts out,

"Mom, that is so stupid --" And she turns in to Sam, like she knew he'd be there, cause he is, cause he can't be anyplace else. This is just what you do, when you get a girl in trouble. You find the county courthouse and fill out an application and then on a day when it's bright and cool and windy, you marry her: you in a button-down shirt, cause that's the nicest thing you own, and she in a sundress that won't fit her come six months. You go and fetch her ice, if she needs ice during the wait for the clerk. You hold it to the back of her neck, under her hair against her skin, so she won't think about throwing up, and it doesn't matter if your fingers go numb.

They put their heads together and he whispers at her whether she wants to go, find someplace in town to stay the night. She doesn't say anything, just leans on him and lets out a sigh. Sam brings his chin up to rest on her hair and gives Ellen his fuck-you smile. She is defeated, and knows it, and she looks like she might be thinking about crying too.

"All right," she says, more to herself than to them. She breathes in big, inflates her body and brings up her shoulders. Before she manages any speeches, she pauses and gets a good look at her daughter. "Sweetie, you need to lie down right now." She clamps a hand to Jo's forehead to check for fever, right in the middle of the bar, and even if there had been a hundred hard-headed guys crowding the place she would have done the same.

Jo isn't looking so hot, that is true. Probably the smell of beer. Sam stands up and puts an arm around her. "Where we going, babe?" He's never been in the back, in private Harvelle territory, and he's still not sure they want to stay the night. But she leads him through the back door and down the hall to a little white-painted bedroom. It's got a window facing the field instead of the parking lot, and a cast-iron single bed, and a poster with curling corners from one of those new-hard-rock bands that were cool when they were teenagers. It doesn't look like Jo at all, and that's probably the whole point, isn't it?

She takes a seat on the bed and leans into him for a second to hyperventilate about what just happened. "When can we leave?" she mumbles.

His hands play through her hair, dig into her scalp the way she likes. "I'm gonna go get some stuff out of the trunk. You get some rest, okay?"

"Being pregnant sucks," she says, by way of answer, and he eventually drags his hands out of her hair and heads back up to the front. Ellen is still there, of course, cleaning up the shards of the glass she dropped.

Sam goes and fetches some basics from the car. Almost everything in the car is hers, in the trunk and in the back seat and lashed on the roof too -- hell, the car is hers. All he owns in the world fits in a duffel bag. If she does decide to stay, well. On his way back in Ellen puts up the broom and gestures him over. He has left his license on the bar.

"This real?" she asks. Her sturdy fingers on the shiny wood surface, nudging that piece of plastic. It is a perfect Florida license, issued to Samuel Andrew Harvelle.

"New name, new social, no priors." He rests his elbows on either side of the license, so Ellen's hand is between them. He looks like an idiot in his license photo. "Nothing I can do about fingerprints, but the rest is as straight-up as I can make it."

She's looking him over, thinking. "I got a call from _Dean_ last winter," she says at last. "He told me about you breaking your leg, and how I should call you Tommy. He was off on his own, he said. I can't believe you let him."

The wave of surprise and envy is overwhelming, and he clamps his mouth shut till it passes. No point admitting to her she's heard more from Dean than he has, this past -- almost a year. "His decision," Sam says, sulky.

"It was the first word I'd heard about Jo in a while." Ellen can match him sulk for sulk. They shrug at each other: both in the same boat. She adds, "He forwards me a message every couple months. Cases he's too busy for. I pass 'em off to others who've got the time. Everybody's happy to take a case from _Dean Winchester_."

It's a hell of a way to find out your kin is alive, hearing it from your new mother-in-law. Sam can't remember why Dean headed back out on the road so soon -- was there a fight? Did one of them say something unforgivable? Sam shakes his head, too tired to think it through, and peels his license up off the bar. "He deserves it. It's what he's good at."

"You're not?" Ellen's eyes darken, fierce and full of sorrow. "You and Jo --"

He states the obvious: "Well, not any _more_." He glances at the back door, but of course Jo is sitting on her childhood bed with her head between her knees. "You should be grateful. She's knocked up, you know she's not out hunting."

Ellen blinks at him, pursing that mouth. She's frowned way too much of her life. "And you can live with that?"

Laughter bubbles out of Sam, unexpected. "Hell, I'm relieved."

She says, "I cannot believe this shit," and that's her way of saying okay.

***

Late October outside Portland, Oregon was damp and chill, like the dead walking constantly through every room. The walls sweated and the heaters labored and it all made Sam claustrophobic.

Sam was sitting bleary and stinking of beer in his motel room, bending spoons with his mind and staring at the bed in front of him. He was very much unreconciled, still, to asking for a single room; even when he had traveled with Gertie they had slept in side-by-sides. Now he was alone, had been alone for what, for ten or eleven months. He could bring home anybody he liked, and nobody would look at him funny. The woman asleep in his bed had gotten the slimmest of cover stories, and really, like she had cared.

There were things he would never have done, that he was doing now. It wasn't weird, that he had gone drinking and had a couple extra and showed off at pool. What was weird was realizing how easy it was, how natural, to pick up girls who wouldn't ask any questions and bring them back to the motel, and screw them in an unfamiliar bed. He couldn't have imagined himself doing that, before.

His college days with Jess were another universe now, a life long gone. She hadn't been his first -- one of Dean's girlfriends had walked him through the basics when he was seventeen -- but she was the first he'd had twice, the first he'd had a chance to learn a lesson one night and apply it the next, and see her flush, delighted and shocked at his getting something right without being asked explicitly. She had been around the block a time or two, and had taught him pretty much all of his sexual repertoire; she had been gentle with his pride and then sorry that that had so surprised him. He was afraid he might be forgetting what it had been like to be in love with her.

The woman in his bed was a brunette, named Brenda. She hadn't wanted any pillow talk when they were done, just thanked him and rolled over. Sam had waited till her breathing was shallow and slow before going through her purse, finding the stash of weed and the spare pair of panties. He wondered, idly, how she had come to be so unhappy.

He stood up, shivering, and clutched himself for warmth. He found his jeans on the floor, and yanked them on. He pawed through the pile of his clothes, touching the leather jacket for a long time, before setting it aside and wrapping himself in a plaid flannel shirt. The pile wasn't large enough to warrant a load of laundry; everything he owned would fit into one load. Up the wall, at his eye-level and higher, the vague edges of discoloration as mildew worked into the walls. Everything in the room smelled like old leftovers.

The air outside was fresher, colder. He hardly glanced back at Brenda, settling his bare feet into his unlaced boots, and shut the door behind him. He watched the fog billow through the parking lot like the full sails of passing galleons. The Impala, parked fifty yards away, was invisible in a soup of cold gray air.

Dean's usual remedy hadn't worked, and Sam didn't really have his own remedy for loneliness, and here he was alone in the dark in a state he hardly knew, in between one place and another, so cut off by the spooky shadows of fog that he might as well be in another universe, or a Sartre play. This time when he shivered it was not from the cold. Sam fished his phone out of his pocket and stared at the screen of phone numbers for a long, long time.

He had made a conscious decision not to add in Dean's new number, when he replaced the phone that was destroyed when Dean got the everliving crap beaten out of him. There was no entry for Dean Winchester, or for Sam Winchester -- Sam was paranoid enough to take care of that. Ellen would know how to reach him, though. Ellen always knew, or could find out. Jo might know, if Dean had followed his programming and gone back to college. The impulse to seek him out was visceral, overwhelming, a compulsion rather than a desire. He steeled himself and punched buttons on the phone.

Shaniece picked up on the second ring. She did not sound groggy. "It's me," said Sam, and she knew who it was.

"Are you hurt? Did something happen?"

"No," he told her, sulking. "I can't call you unless I fucked up?" Sam put his free hand to his head, felt his shorn hair. He wandered a few steps into the fog, and then in a panic spun around, afraid he would lose the hotel room and leave Party Girl Brenda alone with his stuff. It was still there, of course, the low building with its dim lightbulbs and its slabs of concrete. It merged and faded in his brain until it was every motel room he had ever shared, every temporary home, every hideout.

"It's five in the morning."

He paused, tried to calculate time-zone difference with his beer-fogged brain. "Okay, I'm the one who's fucked up. Do you know what today is?"

Her voice was quiet, curt. "Of course I do, Dean. It's the same kind of anniversary for me. Have you been drinking?"

Sam didn't answer her question. He wanted somebody to feel as rotten as he did. "Is your mom even alive?"

"In a way," Shaniece allowed. She waited him out and then answered the question he was about to ask: "A different way from your brother."

The memory of it overcame him, the blood on the carpeting of her apartment and the deadweight of Dean's body in his arms as he carried him into the hospital. That horrific cracking noise as the bones gave way, and Sam's helplessness, pinned to the wall, and the malevolent yellow eyes through all of it. "He'll never forgive me," he said.

Shaniece was severe, edgy. "Is that why you did it? To be forgiven? I thought you did it to save his life."

" _This won't kill him_ , that's what he said." He choked on his words, the same way he'd choked over the words of the spell, hands trembling as he'd pulled the curtain in the emergency room and drawn the proper marks on Dean's body and his own. He'd put his hand on Dean's breastbone to finish the spell, just to be sure that heart was still beating. "I think I'm going crazy, Shani. I don't know if I can take it."

"I know, Dean," she whispered. "I feel that way sometimes too. I think everybody does."

"I just, I, there's nobody in the world who calls me by my right name." Sam felt his voice breaking and cursed himself for it. "There's nobody in the world, Shani."

She paused for a long time, just breathing into the receiver. "I'll be right there." Sam had no idea what that meant. Listless, he stood on the tarmac and waited for her to come back to the phone. In front of him, suddenly, a body was striding out of the mists, down the parking lot from who-knew-where. There had been no cars and there was nowhere to hide. He clapped a hand to his wrist, felt his charms and protections, and felt naked nonetheless.

"Sam," said the figure. She walked right up to him and it was Shaniece. She smiled, something shy and cock-eyed. "Sam. I know your name."

He let out a sob. "What are you doing here?"

She held up her hand in front of him, looked at him through it. She socked him on the arm he felt nothing but the slightest breath of wind. "I've been experimenting. It's like -- like astral projection, or something. I sent myself out, and did a finding spell on the car. That car is like your talisman."

"It's his. Everything that's any good about me, that's the him in me."

"Oh, sweetie." Shaniece stepped very close to him, and pressed her body carefully against his. He felt just a hint of warmth, like holding your hands above a cup of fresh tea. Maybe if she had leaned harder she would have fallen right through; Sam wasn't sure. "We'll live through this," she told him.

She had her chin high, and Sam realized she had changed her hair. All of her waist-long braids were gone, replaced with a small, neat Afro. "How come you cut your hair?"

"I didn't want braids any more. I dreamed that they crawled all over the house and attacked me."

It was his turn to comfort, pressing his hand carefully against the back of her head. He could feel the hairs against his palm, and her body-warmth, but no mass. "Will we? Live through this?"

"We have to. What would your brother do, if you died suddenly? The spell would end, wouldn't it? It would end, and he would know himself, and he would know instantly that you had died. What would he do then?"

"He'd go apeshit." Sam laughed, a nasty sound to his own ears. And then, reasoning it out, knowing it was the truth because the Dean in him knew it: "Oh. He ...wouldn't outlive me very long."

Shaniece shrugged elaborately, her palms up, as if her point was obvious. "That's why you'll live through this, Sam. You're living so that he'll be able to live. You have to live so that you can free him someday. Just like I'm living for my mom."

"My dad died to save Dean's life," he contradicted. "Binney Washington was ready to die for his Martha."

"But he didn't, did he?" Shaniece frowned hard, as if reasoning her way furiously through a puzzle. "He lived for her instead."

"Sometimes," Sam sighed, "I'm not sure what the difference is."


	13. March Into Hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahem, that's Chapter 12A

Hell... really was other people, other people sitting in office cubes. Sam spun, startled at the ordinariness of it. Oatmeal-colored partitions in every direction, squares on squares on squares and ugly fluorescent lighting. Or maybe it was a bog at night, stinking like farts and full of biting black flies. After that it was vaguely proper, sulfuric and hot and underlit, Sam's tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. And then something else again, shifting, flickering, unreal, other-real. It was a realm of magic and the ordinary rules were different here. Here where Sam was.

Freddy and Jeff were _right there_ , just out of sight, in the other world, anchoring him. He could feel them, smell the candles burning, hear the travel-spell still echoing in his ears. They probably couldn't see him, or only his empty body inside the circle. He couldn't even see the circle.

It was Shaniece's spell that showed him he could do it, do both finding and sending at the same time. He'd put it off a long time. He'd been busy, of course, but mostly it was fear of what he would find here. He had selected his talisman carefully, realizing how few objects he had available to him. The dogtags were gone, buried at his mother's headstone, and he'd left the wedding ring with Dean. There wasn't much Dad had left behind; he wasn't a sentimental guy. The thing that made the most sense was the journal, that had all their fingerprints and handwriting all over it. Except the front pages. The front pages were crammed with John's handwriting, so hard it imprinted through to the other side of each page, so full and frenzied no other writing would fit. Sam had held open it in both hands and started to read to the circle, to the ether: "I went to Missouri and I learned the truth --"

And that was how he had come to this Hell.

Sam wandered, curious, amused at himself a little that he should just walk into the underworld no questions asked. No honey-cakes to distract a hound that bars the gate; no ferryman to pay coins; not even a Virgil to narrate him the way. He closed the book and tucked it into his jacket, ready to pull his knife, but nobody challenged his presence. He was tall enough to see over the partition walls, and inside every office was a person, like ice cubes in a tray. Some of them wept and some of them screamed but mostly they sat silent, waiting. Sam did a little math and realized this wasn't anywhere near big enough to hold everybody in the world who deserved to suffer.

Ergo, he was in the right place. Not some kind of Biblical Hell, but a very specific one. Not those who _deserved_ to suffer, but those who did. Very few people looked up as he passed. They were almost all young people, people his age or a little younger. They wore clothes from eras long past: Brylcreem hair from the fifties, styled bobs from World War I. There were a few shirtwaists and cravats, or else Sam wasn't seeing right. The way the place changed, it was hard to be sure.

"Sssstt!" A young woman in an old-fashioned dress tossed her head, eyes darting everywhere. Sam could not help but approach. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.

"Do I know you?" Sam looked her over, from her many-buttoned black boots to the prim collar at the base of her neck. Her hands were in front of her, worn like laborer's hands. She wore long black tresses up in a bun.

The woman waited, as if disbelieving that Sam could not know her. And then in an instant she transformed herself, not magically but repositioning her body like a dancer. She shifted one hip and raised one shoulder and lowered her chin to look up at Sam through her black eyelashes. "And I thought the Winchesters were smart," she said, with sour coquetry.

"Meg," Sam gasped. "Oh. I guess that's not really your name. This is your Hell too?"

"Well of course," said Not-Meg. She tugged at her bodice. "My name used to be Alice. How do you think I ended up under the big boss's power?"

The conclusion was inescapable. "No fucking way. You were a special, weren't you? You were just like me."

"Not like you, dearheart. Like your brother, though." Sam stiffened, and Alice got a laugh out of that. "How is he, by the way?"

Alice was seeing him wrong. It hadn't occurred to him that here he might not look like himself. He touched his chest: the brass pendant. The brass pendant he'd left behind with Dean more than a year ago. He looked at the back of his hand and saw freckles. Away from his body, he _was_ Dean, for all anybody could see. He felt his way forward carefully. "Well, Sam's not here, that's something." If he was going to play Dean with somebody who'd actually met the real McCoy, he was going to have to pull out some wisecracks. "He'll never live down having been possessed by a _girl_."

Alice shrugged. "You take what you can get, when you're free out in the world. He's a terrible body, all elbows and knees. Like possessing a giraffe."

"Uh huh." The Dean in him was demanding closed fists and a fight stance. Sam controlled himself. "So if I could get you out of here, would you help me in return?"

"Sweetie, are you trying to make a deal with the devil's minion?"

"Keeping my options open. You've snuck your way back onto earth twice now, or maybe more, so clearly you know what you're doing. I could use some allies."

"You just want me in a real body so you can hand me that ass-kicking you think you owe me."

"Okay, that too. Just, next time you wiggle your way outta here, give me a call, will you? We might have some things in common."

"Like what?"

"We both hate your boss, for one."

Alice grumped to herself. Sam shrugged his leather jacket higher on his shoulders, and took a step. He had a lot of wandering to do to find what he was looking for.

As he walked away, Alice hissed. "Three more to the left, and two down."

"What?"

Alice was sly, smirking. "Like I don't know what you're looking for."

Sam went three to the left and two down. Alice had not lied, and she did know. Sam found what he was looking for.

Sitting on an ice floe in the middle of a deathly-cold sea, snow in his hair but not shivering, John Winchester: sitting still, leaning forward a little, examining his hands. He didn't hear Sam's footfalls (Sam seemed to be walking on water, wasn't that hilarious) and didn't look up. He looked the same, the same as he'd been when he died, a bit of gray on his chin but his hair mostly dark; lines around his eyes as if he'd stayed up vigil the night before at his son's bedside. That was nearly three years ago now. He was still wearing the same clothes, arm in a sling, the t-shirt cut only a bit at the collar, as if he'd actually given up the ghost just as the doctors were getting at his chest to revive him.

Sam could not restrain himself: "Dad!" That was probably the worst thing he could have done, calling out like that; John looked up and looked right through him with a hatred as thorough and unyielding as anything Sam had ever seen. John moved a little, like he was bored but playing along, and as he stood up the iceberg turned into a ladder-back chair and the floor was a grassy field, endlessly open. John retreated only as far as cube walls would have let him, if they had been there. He didn't even look; he just stopped exactly where the wall would be.

"You keep trying to mess with me," John said, low in his throat like a family rule had been broken. "I guess demons don't get bored." Sam was fascinated and terrified: that anger John had always kept in check was right out in the open, volcanic. When he had told his father he was leaving for Stanford, he had not come under such murderous boiling rage, not all of it, not ever. They had argued a thousand times and Sam had never seen John so implacably hateful.

He looked over John's shoulder at the cube wall, which was a blue-purple horizon, twister-clouds looming, and mastered himself. While he watched it became a stone wall, part of a cave, dripping and cold and dim. "I came to rescue you," said Sam, and put a hand into the cube. He hit a barrier, something invisible, and bounced off.

"Good idea, put on Dean's face, pretend like he's going to do something heroic." John twisted up his face in a sneer. "Knock yourself out."

So he saw the same thing Alice did. Sam raised his chin, the way his brother did when he was playing tough. Like his brother, he saved the tears for some other time, when it was safer. He bashed his fist a few times, poking around to find that barrier's weak spots. Not that a fist was the right tool to use against true evil, but, he tried it anyway.

"How do I get you out of here, Dad?" Sam was just glad he was here alone. "Is there a word or a spell or some kind of tool? What were the terms of your deal?"

John waved one hand, like he'd heard it all before. He held the other one close to his chest, still broken. He'd had the same broken arm for almost three years, never healing. Sam gulped and told him, "We stole your body out of the morgue and burned it in salt, Dad. We watched the flames go down and stuck our fingers in your hot ashes, making sure there weren't any bone-fragments left. It was terrifying. It was like being naked. You were never gonna come stomping in like a pissed off cavalry troop ever again. I asked --"

He barely managed to stop himself from naming names. Sam sniffled and continued. "We talked about the secret and everything. There's nothing left, just this fragment of you, stuck in that fucking deal you made. You should have gone to the reaper years ago."

"I know the terms." Even in Hell, which was suddenly a hallway of endless antiseptic white hospital -- and maybe this one was John's own personal idea of Hell, permanent bedside vigil --, even in Hell John Winchester could make his way sound like the only way. "I'll stay here a hundred years if it means they're alive, and smile at you every goddamn day."

At that, nobody on or under earth could have kept his eyes dry, or his voice low. "Those are the terms? You suffer as long as we're alive? What the hell kind of deal is that?" Sam's hand shook as he grasped at his knife. Not because it would avail him anyway; it was just something to hold onto.

John was serene in his hatred. He did not answer.

"Dad, I swear, you are the --" And Sam clamped his mouth shut just in time. No point in telling him how much leeway _alive_ had already allowed. No wonder Dean hadn't been killed: he could be tortured right to the brink and the deal would still be in force. There was some kind of awful lawyer joke in there, that Dad's self-sacrifice had such horrible loopholes in it. Sam swallowed. "Fine. You get to be boss. I guess I'm just here to tell you, we know what you did. And we're pissed about it. And we're going to do something about that. You'll see the reaper soon, Dad. And not because one of us gets killed," Sam added hastily. "We do this my way."

John wasn't listening, or was masterfully pretending not to listen, his face that impassive mask that said _I told you what the rules are and if you want to break 'em you'll find out the consequences._. It was kind of a shame the demon wasn't here, because that face should totally scare the shit out of him. But the demon wasn't afraid of anything, or not anything Sam knew of.

"I just. I had to make sure what you'd done. Of all the fucking rocks-for-brains stubborn old men."

"You're slipping," said John. "You sound like Sammy, now." He stood there in a pile of musty hay, trapped in a wooden barn like an animal, flames crackling overhead. He didn't care.

Sam let him have the last word -- what other kind of satisfaction was there to give him? -- and stumbled away. He recited the word to end the spell, and was present again in his physical body.

The others were sitting right in front of him, wide-eyed, as if he'd only been gone a moment. Sam gaped back at them, the rage still hot in his face, and it melted suddenly into despair. He had no idea how to free Dad, and was no closer to freeing Dean, and he was all alone with a gaggle of confused sysadmins and accountants and schoolteachers and whatever the hell Jeff did for a living. Sam put his arms around his knees and lowered his head and cried and cried, sitting with a cold numb butt inside a chalked five-pointed circle drawn in the basement of a house in Cincinnati. Freddy came and touched his shoulder, mumbling something nice, and then backed away. Jeff, the newest of their kind, went upstairs and made tea. Sam was grateful for it, and wiped the snot from his face while he accepted a mug. The warmth radiated into his fingers, made him know he was alive still.

"It was that bad?" asked Jeff, shy. Sam looked him over: not tall, pudgy and slow-moving, with white soft hands. Jeff wore a St. Christopher's medallion around his neck, and probably believed in the literal Hell.

"No," Sam lied. "I just miss my dad." Jeff slung an arm across his shoulder, and Sam let himself relax in someone else's grip.


	14. Sweet Child O' Mine

Alvin comes to the house late in the afternoon, on the second day Sam has called in sick with a bad case of parenthood. They're nice days to be playing hooky, sunny and clear, perfect April days -- But Sam has hardly seen them. He's had other things on his mind.

Sam is surprised when opens the door, eyeballing Alvin up and down. He's past fifty, carrying his fat in a great pad in front and in doughy rings at his knees and elbows. He wheezes when he breathes, now and then, and doesn't say anything about it when you ask him if he is okay. His hair is almost all white, including his beard, which he only shaves when he feels like it. He is not married and doesn't seem to talk to anybody and Sam doesn't know what he does at home, when he is not fixing cars. He has never hired anybody on, not till Sam came along.

"Hey, bossman," Sam says, and gestures him into the kitchen. "Sorry I didn't think to stock up on cigars."

Alvin says, "Hey, Sammy," vaguely, looking around the room. He has never been here; they have been friendly but not friends in the five months Sam has worked for him. Sam looks around too, noting only a few unwashed dishes in the sink, the bills neatly stacked on the table. It's a card table, nothing to brag about, and the chairs were picked up one by one at garage sales. But they've patched the dents in the wallboard, and given the room a fresh coat of paint. Alvin is fussing with his hands, just standing there.

"Can I get you anything, or you just want a look at the critter?" Alvin laughs, as Sam hoped he would, and sits in the chair Sam pulls out for him. He accepts a glass of water, but when Sam pulls down the Jack from on top of the fridge, Alvin puts up a hand.

"I don't drink any more."

The things you learn about your boss. "Hey, that's awesome," Sam tells him. "I can't get anybody to drink with me. Jo said she couldn't have any, even now the baby's born. It shows up in her milk." Sam chuckles to himself, and puts the Jack away.

He is watching out of the corner of his eye as Alvin fiddles with his glass of water. Sam really hopes he is not about to be fired. That would really suck. To fill up the silence, he says, "You wouldn't believe the paperwork there is in having a kid. Getting her out of the hospital was like breaking out of Fort Knox. I told Jo we shoulda had the kid at home -- without all that paperwork, we could skip town and nobody's even know she exists."

Alvin laughs at that too, rueful, the way he laughs at all of Sam's jokes about crime. They understand one another, where background checks are concerned. He asks, "Is she asleep?"

"She was staring at everything for like an hour, yesterday, and she's been out cold ever since. I'll go fetch her."

"No, no," Alvin is putting up that hand again. "I don't want to be a bother."

"No bother," Sam says over his shoulder, as he heads into the bedroom. There is no separate nursery room; he hasn't even gotten around to putting together the crib yet. Betty is nestled in a couple of towels in the bottom drawer of the dresser, a cotton sock on her head to keep her warm. He kind of likes to look at Betty in the dresser drawer, he doesn't know why. It's a familiar thing to him. Sam puts a finger on her cheek, and she doesn't stir at all.

"Hey," murmurs Jo, from the bed. She is on her side, purple shadows under her eyes. "Who's in the kitchen?"

"Alvin," he tells her, and lifts the baby up, wrapped in a square of flannel. Sam was stunned to discover a baby could be born needing its fingernails cut. Her eyes are blue, but Jo says all babies are born that way, and they'll change.

"Don't freak. If I'm fired I'm fired." He sits, baby in one arm, next to his wife on the bed. He traces her lips with a thumb. "I'll tell him you need to rest, cause you do." Jo drops her head back down on the pillow.

Sam carries the critter back into the kitchen, where Alvin is standing by the door, examining his toes. "Hey, Alvin, this is Betty." Sam shows her off, not so close Alvin will touch her. The nurses kind of got pissed at him, he was so careful about who was allowed to touch her. Alvin doesn't notice the physical maneuvering, thunderstruck by the creature in Sam's arm. Not even both arms; she is small enough he can fit her whole body on his forearm, with his hand under her skull.

For some reason Sam expected newborn babies to be bigger. Not that Betty isn't big enough to have given Jo a hard time, but seeing dimples on the back of a hand that small -- she looks like a toy, a little girl's doll, but her heart beats fast, pulse visible under her skin, and she is alive. He still hasn't wrapped his brain around it.

"Wow," says Alvin. "Wow." He leans over the child and puts out a thick hand, and then draws it back. Sam is controlling himself against territorial movements; you don't get pushy with your boss when he might still be here to fire you. He stands there and lets Alvin look his fill. "She looks like you," he says at last.

"Unfortunately," Sam adds. She does have a certain Winchester shape around forehead, but Sam thinks she looks like her grandfather, if her grandfather had ever been in a tranquil mood in his life. "I'd be the ugliest little girl in the world."

"Keep her out of the sun, or she'll freckle up, I bet."

"Yeah, I bet." Sam is standing in his kitchen with his boss, making small talk, and this is getting ridiculous. He doesn't know what to say to make him get to the point. Betty gives a big sigh and Sam picks at a booger crust on her nostril.

At last Alvin speaks up. "I'm glad I got to see her, Sammy. That's a pretty child. You should bring her into the shop some time."

Sam doesn't look up. At least he is not being fired, but he still doesn't know what is going on. Gazing at the critter, he says, "Good marketing hook, bring in the single women. Jo says they have, like, baby-radar."

Alvin chuckles. "I swear, your ideas are going to turn us into millionaires." He reaches into his jacket, hasty, and pulls something out. "Here. I want you to have this, okay?" Alvin tucks a white envelope next to the baby, between her body and Sam's chest. It's a fat envelope. Sam suddenly guesses what is inside, as Alvin is turning to leave.

"Whoa, boss, I can't --"

"Sure you can," says Alvin, and pats himself down for his keys. "How else you gonna take care of her shots and getting measured and all that?" His face is red, and that makes his hair whiter. He is wheezing a little now, like he's nervous or angry or ashamed. He doesn't just leave, like he's afraid Sam will throw it away or something. They stand there in the kitchen while the baby sleeps on. Sam doesn't know what to say next.

"Thanks, man," Sam tells him after a minute. He sees Alvin relax a little, edge a smile up one side of his face. "I don't know how to --"

"Babies are for spoiling, kid." And now Alvin employs both sides of his face, and it's a real smile -- the first one he's cracked since he arrived. "Take tomorrow off too, Sammy. I'll see you Friday." And he lets himself out the door quick, trotting down the walk back to his car. Sam is standing there in the doorway with a sleeping baby and an envelope with probably a thousand dollars in it.

There is already six thousand secreted around the house, in rolls hidden in places Jo won't think to look, because she still thinks they can pull all this off without resorting to fraud. Eight weeks ago Sam drove up to the San Fernando Valley and took out a post office box under the name Charles Parker and applied for six credit cards and when they came, took out cash advances on all of them. But Jo doesn't know about that, any more than Alvin does. Jo thinks that health insurance and the state will take care of everything. Sam has a higher margin for safe than he likes to admit.

Betty grunts and makes a face, like she's thinking about waking up. Sam carries her carefully back into the bedroom and sits down again at Jo's side. She props her head up, hair mussed in all directions. She's wearing one of Sam's t-shirts and a gigantic pair of granny underwear, and that's all. She is gorgeous.

"I need a shower," she grumbles, as he sits there staring. "What's that?"

Sam has forgotten about the envelope. He pulls it out from the crook of his elbow and passes it to Jo. "From Alvin," he tells her, shrugging.

Her nimble fingers tap through a double-handful of crisp twenties. "Ha! baby shower," she crows. Sam is busy imagining a horde of women invading his house and painting everything pink when Jo adds, "Of course, not like you would know what normal people do. You were raised by wolves."

"Hey, those were some badass wolves --"

"He's being a _friend_ , Sammy. I don't think he has a lot of friends. Probably you're the only person he talks to all week."

"So, he's lonely so he gives his friends money?"

"He's trying to tell you he's happy for you. What else is he gonna give, a set of brake pads?"

"Car could stand a new fan belt."

"Men!" But she laughs. She lies there on her side, the baby on his arm between them sleeping fitfully, and Sam is blown away: this is his _family_. He is in love with that little critter like getting jumped from behind in a dark alley: a shatter against his skull and then the hot sensation spreading forward, red-gold ache through his eyes and jaw, messing with his sinuses. It strikes him dumb, it makes him a little shaky: he is completely responsible for the safety of that thing. Having a child is terrifying. Jo is looking at him funny.

"So I guess this is how it's supposed to work." Sam touches her thigh, shyly. "You feel okay? Want another icepack? If you're bleeding more than you should --"

"Well I don't know, babe," she mocks, "I think I might have spent ten hours squashing a basketball through a mail slot." He goggles at her, and busts out laughing. She twitches, trying to keep a straight face, and protests, "I'm not gonna die, I'm just fucking sore. And I feel gross and slimy and I'm like leaking from every orifice!" She flops onto her back theatrically.

Sam watches her breasts settle under the t-shirt -- they're big, heavy. They're marking up the shirt a little, just dribbles here and there. There's supposed to be some kind of rule about mothers not being sexy, or anyway not ones that you've seen the whole miracle of life business happening to right up close, like an extra special episode from public television. That rule is full of shit: she's pretty damned sexy right now, bedhead and maxipad and all. He leans in to kiss her and it turns into a makeout session, just the fun playful stuff while Betty grumbles to herself on Sam's arm. He could do this all day, but Betty finally works herself up to a full wail.

Betty's parents rest their foreheads together for a long moment before turning to their daughter. To Sam's delight, Jo doesn't even bother trying to lift the t-shirt modestly, just takes the whole thing off and holds Betty to one breast. "What?" she asks, at his amazed smile. "Get your butt over here and help me teach her to not just spill it all over the place. Did you even read that handout the nurses gave you?"

Sam did not read that handout. If there is one thing he knows, though, about the female body, it is breasts. He climbs around to watch over Jo's shoulder.


	15. Normal

The trouble with single parents on the run is that they have a habit of going to ground and blending in. Melvin had sent him off to Olympia, Washington with a frown and a "...but I'm not sure she'll still be there," and of course she wasn't. Sam had stopped for coffee in every eastbound truck stop he could find, hangdog and heartbroken, and wrung clues from the waitresses with Dean's charm. Nell Mackey had no idea she had left a sorrowful boyfriend behind, but steadily he was catching up with her.

Butte, Montana seemed like a big enough place to stop for a while, earn a little cash, park the kids in a school where they wouldn't be the only new faces. It was the kind of city John would have picked, if they'd ever ranged this far. Sam walked its streets, superimposing images of other small cities over it: train tracks or no; missing dog posters on the telephone poles; the convenience stores run by Greeks, or Algerians, or Punjabis, or second-generation Italians. It was warming spring, jacket weather, the sky big and limpid as if it could rain without clouds.

Legwork and some subtle thievery had turned up a woman and two children checking into Dew Drop Inn, and she'd had enough capital to put down for a month, which was cheaper overall than week-to-week. Sam had surveilled carefully, picked out his target, and was ready to make contact. He parked the Impala several blocks away from where Nell had gotten a job -- cash register at a mom-and-pop -- and practiced hunching himself smaller as he walked up. No point in scaring her just casting a shadow; or, well, he was going to scare her whatever he did.

He was a couple hundred yards out and passing an empty storefront when they struck. Two of them, the first rough like a teenager on a rampage and the second the cool head, standing back. Sam knocked Number One away, shoving him hard in the ribs, but Number Two danced out of arm's reach. He showed Sam the steel gleam under his jean jacket -- a .45. Business. Number One got back up, swearing, and came at Sam again, unaware of his irrelevance. He was a young kid, younger than Sam, blond in that thatchy way like his hair wasn't sure it wanted to stay on his head. He was beefy and dressed, like Sam, in patched plaid. He hit the ground pretty hard.

"Where we going?" Sam asked Number Two. Number Two was blond as well, with skin heavily wrinkled and spotted from smoking or from sun. Father and son, probably. Number Two gave a shrug and gestured at the alley next to the storefront. Sam entertained himself with the idea that it might really just be a mugging, that they weren't taking him out back to put him down like a beast. Undone by the car again, had to be.

He let them draw him in a ways, so they weren't obvious from the street, but not so far he'd have a long way to go if he broke for it. "Okay, fine, what do you want?" Sam asked, reaching for his wallet. Number One grabbed his arms from behind and knocked him, into the concrete wall. Sam breathed the stony damp and felt a hot body mashed against his back.

"Just making sure you aren't possessed." Number One had the aura of the fanatic about him, contempt thick in his voice. Number Two was calmer, hands-off. Sam turned his head to converse with the brains of the operation.

Number Two looked him up and down. "You are the demon-hunter, right?"

Sam didn't even bother lying. "I -- guess? I grew up hunting anything foul." Number One was breathing in his ear. The guy seemed like he was getting some kind of psychotic charge out of holding Sam captive. Sam wondered whether his father noticed, or cared, that he had a loose cannon for a son.

"But you're full time on possessions now." That was familiar language -- Sam realized it was his own language, that the man in the straw hat, down in Texas, had spread the word verbatim about Dean Winchester being on a mission. Number Two stuck one hand in his back pocket, like this was an ordinary conversation in the front of a general store. "What can you tell us?"

"Could you call off your guard dog? Please?" Same phrased it with as much dismissal as he could muster. Number Two nodded and Sam fell away from the concrete wall. He took his time feeling out his bruises, a scrape on his jaw, a certain sore twinge in his elbow, before answering colleague-to-colleague. "About possession? Not much. You know about holy water. The basic exorcism is written down in every horror novel from here to Hell and back. Most of what I know about possessions I learned from Bobby out Sioux Falls. You know Bobby?"

Number Two's body language was shifting subtly. With his eyes he called Number One back to his side, quelling him. "I talked to him. He said Dean Winchester was the hands-down expert these days."

Damn Bobby. Well, it was true, and there was no way to warn him off without telling him everything. "He and I did it together. He's the one knows how to make charms."

Number Two stiffened up again. "It's about that cursed brother of yours, aint it? You took care of him, I heard?"

Sam breathed carefully through his nose and formulated a response. "Yes," he said flatly, playing up the resentment of having to talk about it all over again. "Listen, I got to --" He pushed forward against Number Two, gambling that they'd have a spatial respect for grief. And they did, a little; Number Two stepped aside a bit, just enough for Sam to reach out suddenly and snatch that .45 from where it sat in his jean jacket. He shoved the butt back into Number Two's ribs and was on Number One before either of them could assess the situation.

Dean loved to fight, and he loved more to fight dirty. Sam had both men on the ground, looking up at their own gun, in a minute or two. Number One's nose was probably broken.

"Just leave me the hell alone," Sam told them, playacting grief a little longer. No point having to kill them. "Don't you know? A Winchester always hunts alone." He safetied the gun and walked away, leaving them surprised on the gravel. He got all the way back out to the street before realizing what he'd said, and how, under the Dirty Harry sloganeering, it was dreadfully truthful. He had to stop, just lean against the window of a barbershop, to gather himself up enough so he was ready to face Nell Mackey.

He walked into the grocery store where he'd seen her working, and wandered the short aisles casing the place. There was only one person in the store, an old man who usually didn't run the cash register. Nell was not in the back, that he could see. Nell was not there. Sam picked out a couple of candy bars and let himself be rung up as he fumbled for cash. "Hey, didn't there used to be a girl on the register? I swear I saw her yesterday."

"Nice girl," said the old man. "She up and left, just ten, twenty minutes ago. She was just standing there and she stiffened up and walked out the store. Didn't even say nothing, just bolted."

"Huh," said Sam, not feigning his confusion. "Did she see somebody, maybe out the window?"

"She wasn't looking out the window," said the old man. "She was tagging the soup cans. I still got her purse, in the back. Maybe something she forgot at home, I guess. I wisht she'd told me what it was, stead of leaving like that." He grumbled as he handed Sam his change. "I thought I had a reliable one in her, not like some of the teenagers I had in the past."

"Thanks," Sam told him absently, and managed not to break out into a run until after he was out of sight of the store.

It was just as well he ran. When he got back to the Impala he found that someone had taken a lipstick and scrawled on the windshield, "HI SAMMY," with the Y ending short, as if he'd scared the graffiti artist away. He drove back to the Dew Drop Inn and found Nell's motel room door open. Things were messy, but not so messy that anybody had had time to search it in detail. There were assorted socks and four pairs of children's underwear hanging from the shower rod, damp and drying in the spring sun. Two little pairs and two bigger pairs. The children.

There was a lot to do. He dug out his phone and called up Lillian. "Hey, Lil, I need a big favor," he told her. With his free hand he found a duffel on the floor and started shoving Nell Mackey's things into it. "I got two children who are going to need a place to stay. Can you _persuade_ their school to let them go into my custody? Call me the biological father or something. I'll be there in an hour."

"Do you know which school?" asked Lillian, ever reasonable. "And the kids' names?"

"Uh, uh," Sam cast about the motel room, trying to remember where his dad had hidden important papers. He felt the edges of the television and found a manila folder. Of course. He lifted the TV -- it was chained to the wall -- and opened up the story of Nell Mackey's life. "Here we are. Jenny and James Mackey, ages eight and six. They're at, uhhh, here we go, James Madison Elementary School, and I got a phone number here. You ready?"

"You're going to bring them _here_?" Lillian asked at last.

"I -- where else am I gonna put 'em? I mean, you're closest, and you can persuade them that you really are friendly to their mom, right?"

"....Oh," said Lillian. "What happened to her?"

Sam hunted through a double-handful of picture books, their pages wavy from water damage, and ended up packing them all. Beside them, a romance novel, with a picture of the two children used as a bookmark. "Possessed, I think. We gotta move, Lil. Ready for that phone number?"

He heard her let out a breath, and then she was ready.

***

"She looks like hell," says Ellen. She squints into the California sun. "She is my daughter and I am allowed to say that."

"Just don't say it to her face," Sam sighs. He pulls into the driveway after their grocery trip. Sam has taken his mother-in-law shopping in order to avoid an epic mother-daughter cage-match, which always sounds so much sexier when they talk about it on pay cable, you know? It's not nearly as much fun in your own living room, when your wife hasn't had two hours' uninterrupted sleep in four weeks.

If anyone had told Sam that parenting was like being on a permanent stakeout, snatching a nap in between bouts of disgusting substances, he would have laughed, or run away. But he kind of has a handle on a stakeout, the entertaining yourself in limited circumstances and the iron stomach so that twelve hours of Cheez Doodles and Dr. Pepper don't leave you woozy and unfit for a foot chase. Jo isn't used to stakeouts, and she is the one with the built-in milk machine. Jo's hair is unwashed, and one big dark stripe where her natural color is growing in, seven or eight weeks' worth. It makes her skin look paler, like she needs any help with that. Two nights ago, Sam woke her out of a doze at the kitchen table, with macaroni unchewed in her mouth. Sam hasn't told Ellen _that_ little story.

They unload the groceries -- or really, he should call them rations, since Ellen bought as if World War Three were starting -- onto the driveway and Sam opens the back seat for Betty. The baby is conked out in her carseat, her bitchin' sunglasses askew on her face. Sam takes them off and pulls down her Muscle Car sweatshirt, which has ridden up around her belly, and lifts her, seat and all, into the house. She is still so small, like a squirmy gallon of hot sour milk. It's freaky. He sits himself and the car seat on the floor while Ellen brings in paper bags of food, thumping them on the countertops like the noise won't wake anybody up. Betty fusses, wrinkling her nose, and that is enough reason to pick her up.

Sam rucks her upright into the crook of his neck like she belongs there, drool and all, because she does. He likes knowing that anything coming at her will have to go through him first. He likes having her right there, to touch and make sure she is okay. In the kitchen, Ellen puts away juice and steaks and things that are supposed to keep Jo healthy. She pauses with a loaf of bread in her hand as Sam ambles in to help her. He has become an expert at one-handed chores.

"I guess you're doing all right," she says, and puts her free hand on the back of Betty's head. "I forgot you have some experience at it."

He chuckles. "Everything I know I learned from Dean."

Ellen puts on a disapproving frown, goes back to putting things away. As with everything else in the household, she is reorganizing where things go in the kitchen as she sees fit. "Are you two still not talking?"

There is something in him that wants to play it smooth, be friendly and noncommittal and leave her with the wrong impression; keep her out of his business. But he just stands there, open-mouthed, while she stuffs a five-pound bag of flour into the bottom cabinet. The only thing he can think of he has ever made with flour is glue, for paper kites. He shuts his trap as Ellen turns to him, waiting for an answer. "He's not talking to me," he blurts, and then grabs up some things for the high cabinet and stuffs it all up there, brusque. He hadn't meant to say that.

She presses her lips together. "You used to be so close."

Sam says nothing, keeping the hurt at arm's reach. She stacks up ten packages of red Jello, like Jello is something exotic and difficult he wouldn't think to buy himself after she goes home to Nebraska. The quiet stretches out, uncomfortable. He tells her at last, "Last time, it was almost three years."

That shuts her up good. Sam paces up and down the kitchen, soothing Betty on his shoulder, while he thinks over that three-year gap. Dean had asked, _Would you have taken my calls?_ and Sam thinks the answer would probably have been no, but he doesn't remember why. Maybe it was just some kind of teenaged resentment. He is not a teenager any more. But there are only so many phone messages and dead-drop postcards you can send before you get the hint. If Dean doesn't want to be found, he won't be. Sam is pretty sure he would have heard, if he'd turned up dead or in federal custody. Ellen would have heard, and wouldn't be asking.

Betty is getting into a cranky whine, her hungry noise. If he hurries, Sam can get her settled in next to Jo and nursing without Jo even waking up all the way. He lets himself into the bedroom and sits on the bed just as she is opening her eyes.

"Damn," he mumbles, but Jo is smiling as she sits up.

"It's okay." Betty smacks and suckles hungrily at her mother. "I'm just surprised you didn't kill my mother in the grocery store."

"Is that any way to talk about a grandma?" Sam asks, waggling his eyebrows at her. He thumbs sleep out of her eyes. "Oh, hey, I got you something." He slips out of the room and hunts around in the groceries till he finds it. Jo just stares as he shows her the box; probably it's the wrong kind. There are an awful lot of shades of blonde, it turns out, and Sam has no idea which kind of hair dye Jo uses. He has picked the box with the girl that looks the most like her: serious eyes, dark eyebrows, a secret smile on her face. "I figure, we pawn the critter off on grandma for the evening, have a hot boy-on-girl night of bleach and chemicals."

The crazy grin he's putting on can make Jo laugh, and that's good enough. "Your kinks are so predictable. Please tell me you bought a box for yourself."

"What?" he squawks. "You are not messing with my hair."

"Oh, it would be so cute," she warbles.

"I am not _cute_. There will be no _cute_." Somehow, his outrage does not make the mark it is supposed to make.

After dinner he leaves the washing-up to Ellen and Betty conked out in her crib. He puts on plastic gloves like out of some kind of doctor's office porn and sits Jo down on the closed toilet seat and works noxious substances into her long yellow-and-brown hair. She makes these awesome noises of satisfaction, despite all the warnings on the bottle that this stuff can burn your skin and leave you bald. Dye splatters all over the bathroom sink. Sam plays stylist, giving Jo a mohawk, and she laughs hysterically when she sees herself in the mirror. Sam sets the kitchen timer for the coloring and closes the bathroom door and makes out with his wife while she clutches him, fierce, and tries not to mark the wall with the gunk on her head.

"You bastard," she whispers to him, pulling away as the timer dings. "My _mother_ is in the next room."

"If she doesn't know where babies come from by now," Sam teases her. He runs his hands up Jo's flanks and gets a shiver in return. Her body is rubbery, still working itself back from being all bent out of shape. It's a good look on her, more padding in the butt and excellent thighs and those heavy breasts under her tank top. She is all noodly, hand on the edge of the sink (and smudged with dye), relaxed and easy like she hasn't been since -- well certainly not since Ellen came to visit, but maybe not since the first trimester.

"Strip," she commands.

"What??"

Jo turns on the shower. "The timer dinged. I have to rinse this out. You don't want to wear your clothes in the shower, do you?"

Sam's job is always to make her happy. "I guess not," he laughs.

***

"You don't sing very good," the little girl Jenny said, from the back seat. Sam glanced in the rearview at her, opening his mouth to deny singing at all, which was how he realized his mouth was already open, shaping words.

"...live like a refugee," he concluded lamely, and Tom Petty continued singing without any help. "Sorry."

"My mom can sing. She was in a choir at church." Jenny nodded to herself, her French braids hitching up and down on her shoulders.

The children were in the back seat, to keep them inconspicuous and to keep them from accidentally opening the glove box and finding the .45 Sam had stashed there. "What's your brother doing?" he asked, to distract Jenny from thinking about her mother.

"I gotta pee," said James, from where he sat in the footwell.

James had had to pee a lot, Jenny too. Sam had no idea how his father had managed it, being on the road with two children -- how had he gotten anywhere, stopping every hour for bathroom breaks? And yet Sam couldn't remember any other way of being except on the road, or arriving someplace new, or planning a departure.

"We're almost to Aunt Lillian's house, so you got to hold it, okay?"

"Okay," said James.

Jenny said, "How come my mom never told us about Aunt Lillian?"

Sam winced to himself and cast about for a suitable lie. "Well, you talked to her on the phone. I guess -- maybe they had a fight once? How come your mom moved you away from Olympia?"

There was a little gasp from the footwell and Jenny turned her head down, lips tight, telling James to shut up without saying anything. Sam had been on the receiving end of that kind of look so many times he couldn't help but chuckle to himself.

"I grew up moving around a lot," he told her. She caught his eye in the rearview, her black curly eyelashes flapping. She didn't ask the logical question. "My dad wanted to keep us safe. He taught us a lot of stuff, like how to take care of yourself if nobody comes home one night. How to tell grownups what they want to hear."

Jenny said nothing. James climbed up out of the footwell and slid onto the seat next to his sister. They didn't look alike, much; James was fair, with a bow-mouth, while his sister was dark and wide-eyed. Probably they had different fathers -- but Sam didn't want to pry. It was not like their mother could answer any questions even if she wanted to. "My dad died. Mom keeps us safe," he said, while his sister clutched at him to stop him talking. She pinched him on the upper arm, hard, and James let out a shout.

"Hey, hey --" Sam called, trying to legislate from the front seat. "Quit hurting your brother. It doesn't matter what he tells me, I am not telling anybody else."

"He always tells!" said Jenny, in the agony of her being two years older.

Sam told her, heartfelt: "He'll learn."

This was not satisfaction to an eight-year-old sister. She crossed her arms and looked out the window, while James muttered her horrible death and crawled to the far end of the bench seat. Sam had had his fair number of fights on that seat, and the bench, while enormous, was not wide enough to maintain the illusion that one's opponent would be or had already been eaten by sharks.

They exited off the highway and navigated the streets of Tacoma toward Lillian's house in silence. Lillian didn't actually know a thing about children, but Sam realized, neither did his father, when he was saddled with a toddler and an infant and no wife to take care of them. You learned, somehow.

Lillian was standing in the front yard of her building, waiting for them, when they arrived. She was in a gigantic yellow raincoat, holding Biff by his collar. That was a good move, using the dog to make friends with. Biff was a genial, clueless mongrel almost big enough for James to ride. As they pulled into her driveway, Jenny came out of her funk long enough to squeal, "Oh, is that her? Is that her? James, she has a dog!"

The children piled out of the car and introduced themselves to Biff while Sam parked. He was pocketing the keys while Lillian crouched down to their level and said, magic in her voice, "I've missed you two so much." Jenny and James instantly folded into her arms as if they had known her all their lives.

"Lillian is going to keep you safe," said Sam, and she looked up over James's shoulder and winked.

"Lillian is going to have a lot of work to do, no thanks to your Uncle Dean."

He stuffed his hands in his back pockets and squinted through the drizzle. "Uncle Dean is going to be busy finding Nell."

It was low enough the children didn't hear, or didn't notice. Lillian looked over her shoulder as she led them inside out of the rain. She had let go of Biff, who was busily sniffing at Sam's knees. "Come on in out of the rain. We'll make cookies," she called. "So you won't be hungry on the road."


	16. Proud Mary

It was the junction of great rivers, because that's a place of power. It was underground, because like seeks like. It was in Pittsburgh, because the three rivers turning into the Ohio River were the second-biggest river junction Sam had ever heard of, and because the city was old enough to have a decrepit sewer system. That it was an old center of trade and industry, a union city, home of give-and-take, that helped too.

Sam walked along the dim culvert, listening to the dripping. It was raining up above, in the real world, and so it rained, more slowly, down here. Somewhere far, the water gathered and rushed and escaped at last into the river. Sam headed in that direction, parcel in hand. He shuddered at the chill -- it was colder below-ground than the midsummer air would lead one to expect. He shouldn't have worn a t-shirt.

The Sluice Gate was deep under the city, someplace even the city workers didn't know about or remember or avoided as if it didn't exist. Because he was looking for it, Sam knew he would find it. People had been finding their way there for a very long time. The low concrete ceiling opened up above him, into a cavern of city engineering, rusting old iron grates on all sides. Through the middle of the room ran a channel of water, full of green leaves and candy wrappers and the detritus of the real world. At one end of the channel the Sluice Gate sat in its post.

Contrary to the implications of all the local folk tales, it was not an object or a location at all: it was a creature. It was a creature that cast a great holey cape into the surging waters and stopped it up, just long enough to fish an orange peel out of the stream. It pulled back its fabric plug and the water leapt onward, down and out, someplace back into daylight. The creature was hideous, dressed in cast-off rags, elderly, gnarled and browned and stinking like shit. It was shaped like a human, and turned to face Sam where he stood in the doorway. It had brown eyes and a smirk and one hand on its hip like it had been waiting.

It took a bite of the peel and Sam saw its pointed teeth. They were yellow. He kept himself still, trying not to act afraid, while the Sluice Gate spoke with its mouth full: "What'dja brung me?" Sam's skin attempted to leap off his body and run away, that voice was so -- unpleasant.

Sam set down the box carefully on the humid stone and stepped back from it, ginger in this creature's domain. "Pies. One apple and one raspberry-rhubarb." He nudged the box with his foot, pushed it toward the creature.

"Oh, hm, oh," muttered the Sluice Gate to itself. It tossed away the orange peel. "Pie, I spy pie. Home made, mom and yins together?" It stalked the box on freakishly long and wrong-jointed legs, hunching forward, inhaling a scent though the pies were hours cold. Sam tucked his hands behind his back and stood still.

"I didn't say," said Sam. "But yes, I made it. My own hands." He had made them himself in the paltry kitchen of his rental, and in the process finally found out what Crisco was for. He had sugared the berries and rolled the crusts with a wax-paper-covered soda bottle, thinking with a pang of the cake he'd had on his tenth birthday. Dad and Dean had bought it unfrosted, and had frosted it with grape jelly because they didn't know how to make frosting. They had not been the kind to look up frosting in a cookbook (if they'd ever owned a cookbook, which they probably hadn't), but Sam used Julia Child from out of the library. He'd gotten flour in his hair and berry juice all over his jeans, while he had turned the pages of the book with telekinesis. Those pies were as much made of him as any finger-painting he'd brought home from kindergarten.

The Sluice Gate had long, fine fingers, like comb-teeth, but bent and with tapping long nails. It carefully untied the string on the box. Sam stood there, hands behind him, and realized that for two hundred years scared housewives had stood squirming in his stead, asking after intelligence on the crop or a missing husband or the health of an unborn child. It was one thing to leave an offering and go home safe and dream the answer to your question; it was another to have to stand there and know what kind of beast knew the inside of your business. He was probably the first man to stand here since the city's founding; this was women's magic, and he was an interloper.

The protocol was pretty clear: set down the offering, wait, and then ask. Sam stood still, watching the Sluice Gate as it pulled out the pie on top, and then the standing divider to get at the pie below. It straightened with a pie in either hand -- the cape straggling behind, tucked into a belt or a pocket or whatever -- and Sam deemed it time and he squared his shoulders. "Two pies, two questions."

The Sluice Gate took a bite of the apple pie, tin bottom and all. The juices ran down its chin and dripped.

He had rehearsed it with Shaniece, and phrased it carefully. "First question: How may the yellow-eyed demon be destroyed?"

Two more bites, in rapid succession. The Sluice Gate chuckled to itself, chewing mouth-open, glints of the pie tin amid the mass of crust and fruit. It turned its head, closed one eye as it swallowed, sighed. "Delightful. An amateur's hand -- such care! Such foolishness!" That appeared to be a smile. "First answer: three things is how: dozens of hands, special tears out from normal eyes, and the loving blood of a luck-child, given freely."

Sam mouthed the words to himself, uncomprehending: hands, tears, and a luck-child. Whatever that was. It sounded like Grimm, not like real everyday magic. The Sluice Gate stood before him, berry pie in hand, impatient.

"Second question, second question!" it remonstrated, and caught Sam's attention.

"Yeah, right. Sorry. Um, okay." The Sluice Gate took a bite. Raspberry juice ran down its throat like blood. "Second question: A dead soul trapped in a deal with a demon. By what method may it be freed?"

The Sluice Gate munched on berries for a long time, feeding itself all but one last bite of the pie before answering. "Second answer: mayn't. A deal is not for breaking, not with a demon. They have power and the dead do not. When the demon ends, the deal lives on, until the word of unbinding. Even then, there is no free for the dead. That is reaper-talk, and you ain't reaper, luck-child."

"I aint reaper," Sam echoed sadly, and then the words broke over his head like a wave of dirty river water. "I am a luck-child?"

"Third pie, third question," crooned the Sluice Gate, peering one way and the other as if Sam might have another parcel.

Trembling, Sam shook his head. "No more questions. I, um, I have to go now. Thank you, thanks for the answers." He stuffed his hands in his pockets and realized he didn't want to give this creature his back. But the Sluice Gate only sniffed and turned back to its work, peering into the gloomy waters in the channel, waiting to pounce on garbage that took its fancy. It paused, watching, and raised its cape high. Sam ducked back into the tunnel and got the hell out of there.

It wasn't too hard to retrace his steps back to the manhole he'd come in by, and slip out into daylight again. The rain was down to a drizzle, the contented trailing ends of a summer cloudburst. If he looked up, Sam was sure he would see rainbows. Instead he let himself into the rental apartment and showered until his skin was raw. The smell of sewage would not go away.


	17. The Weight

Sam picks up chalk and a spare canister of salt at the corner store, nodding at the guy behind the counter. It's getting on towards evening, this late in the fall, so Sam drives the stroller home with the sky purple overhead. It's only a few steps up to the front door, and Betty doesn't wake as he lifts her right into the kitchen. She is six months old minus one day.

He leaves her in the stroller as he paces through the apartment. Jo will not approve. She won't even understand it, and he doesn't want to have to explain it to her. She will totally freak if she finds it in the middle of the night, when she gets home from work. The chalk he bought is white, as are the grease pencils he lifted from work -- he'll make it as invisible as he can without making it ineffective.

Betty creases her brow like a disapproving grandma, but doesn't wake. She's lost a sock somehow, one foot striped purple and the other one naked pink; Sam looks at that foot, its stubby toes, and digs out his wallet. Under the driver's license is the charm he's kept ever since Bobby gave it to him; he still has no idea whether it works or not, but he takes its red thread and ties it around Betty's ankle. Not that true evil would get much out of possessing a critter who can't even walk, but he does it anyway. He pulls a blanket over her and tucks it in.

Head and shoulders under the bed, he draws a Key of Solomon, blowing dust bunnies out of the way. He does the same under the couch, and on the underside of the kitchen table. He pulls the crib out from its place and draws Devil's Traps on the two posts that face the wall: a magic lockbox. The quincunx sigil is smaller and easier to hide -- on a corner of the front door, on all the window frames -- but it's not as powerful, even double-inscribed. Sam spends two hours racking his brains for other pre-emptive measures he can use, that Jo won't find. Protection, silence, invisibility, dead-ball on all forms of hoodoo, hijinks, and unnatural dealings. The grease pencil turns out to be almost imperceptible on the kitchen linoleum.

He dissolves salt in a vinegar solution and washes all the windows with it, then does the same to the threshold of every room. He pours the leftovers down all of the drains. He checks that the shotgun is loaded, rehangs it high on the living room wall. He's got all the tools he needs to put together a home-made flamethrower. He's got the exorcism ritual memorized, and a gallon jug of holy water in the fridge. It is a day early and he has no reason to expect anything at all will happen. He can't decide whether a hotel room two towns over would be safer than home.

The baby makes a little cranky noise and flaps one hand. Sam gathers her up into his arms and sings "Black Betty" to her in a whisper and she settles again. He paces the living room. The couch smells kind of like somebody fried rancid eggs underneath the cushions, but it was cheap and is still comfortable. Between them, Sam and Jo have worn a low spot in the middle cushion, staring blankly at the television at all hours while the baby fusses. The baby fusses a lot, as ready to play at three in the morning as at three in the afternoon.

There has got to be something else he hasn't thought of. He stands there in his warded house and can't think of anything more he can do to keep his family safe. He has exactly one day before she is six months old, and if he doesn't think of everything something disastrous might happen. He is definitely weighing the merits of a hotel room. Jo wouldn't understand. She would just shrug and say "I thought that crap was over" and be done with it. He can't work out how to stay in a hotel room without her knowing about it; you don't exactly go stepping out on your wife with your infant in hand.

He carries Betty into the bedroom and puts her down in her crib. She doesn't stir. Sam sits on the end of the bed and toes off his shoes, staring at her, terrified, trying to think of some other way he can protect her.

He wakes up that way, at some crazy hour of night, still in his jeans and curled up on his side like he just keeled over on the spot. There is a blanket over his shoulders and he is shaking from a nightmare. He must have made a noise; Jo pokes her head in from the kitchen, still half-dressed for bartending. "Bad dream?" she asks. Like it happens often enough she's gotten used to it. Sam doesn't like that; he didn't think it was that common a thing. She comes and sits next to him on the bed.

"Nothing," he mumbles at her. "The past in a blender. What time is it?"

"Two. I got home a few minutes ago."

He chafes his face with both hands, sitting up, and then starts to strip out of his clothes. He is standing in his underwear, giving her his back, while Jo looks him over. He doesn't need to turn around to know that stare, how she takes him all in with one glance. "It wasn't anything," he protests, low, and then crawls onto the bed next to her. "It was Dean fighting with Dad. They never fought, ever. Dean always did what he was told."

"How come?" Jo asks, as if she's really curious. She taps him on his collarbone when he doesn't have an answer.

"Cause he's a pussy? I don't know."

Jo knows how to get his attention. She leans down towards her shoes and grabs him by his right ankle. He startles badly enough that the baby startles in her crib, lets out one wail. "Seriously. I'd like to know."

Sam scratches his head and tries to come up with a serious answer. "Cause he was in charge while Dad was gone. I don't know. He's just like that."

She gives up the third degree and kisses him, rubs a knuckle against his unshaved jaw. "Go back to sleep and dream about me," she tells him, and helps him under the sheet. She pulls up the blanket and tucks him in, just like he tucked Betty in, earlier in the night. He lets her play mom and tidy up and head back into the kitchen, humming to herself as she does whatever she does with her private hour in the middle of the night.

Sam really really hopes that he does not dream about her. He closes his eyes against the open whiteness of the ceiling.

***

The waiting room of Pamela True Sight, All Major Credit Cards Accepted Satisfaction and Honest Answers Guaranteed, was as tacky and dull as a dentist's office. Sam stared at his feet on the pink shag carpet and rested a while, but Randall, his newest find, had energy to spare and a mouth that just wouldn't quit.

"Oh, check out the gold paint on the mirrors," the kid blabbed. "You think this used to be a whorehouse or something?"

Sam thought it used to be a front parlor, in a small town that didn't have much use for parlors any more. From the outside, it was a rangy old white house in La Chance, Mississippi, just up the road from where he'd tracked down Randall, and the sign in the window was the only evidence that hoodoo might be going on inside. Sam didn't say out loud that satisfaction and truthful answers were not actually the same thing. Randall had never been to a psychic in his life. He had probably never been to Memphis in his life, only a hundred miles away.

"We got this broken tool one time, at my uncle's shop," Randall continued, "and I didn't even know what it was, till I held it in my hands. I mean, I fixed it, but, I couldn't talk to that customer ever again, you know? Knowing stuff about her like that." He dug his fingers into his curly black hair and laughed, a forced noise like a balky furnace starting up. Sam looked him over.

"If you don't think you can take it, you can wait in the car. I should be able to find out without you being there." Randall appeared to be thinking about the offer when the door to the rest of the house opened.

Pamela True Sight was a woman of late middle age, heavily lined about the mouth. She wore an Ole Miss t-shirt and jeans, and shook Sam's hand like she was agreeing to cut his hair, not look into the future. Sam liked her instantly, her graying bunned hair and the butt of a cigarette between her lips and the liver spots on her forearms. Sam couldn't think who she reminded him of.

"Here to get your fortune told?" she asked, and Sam shook his head.

"Well, we have a friend, who went missing. We're hoping you can give us some guidance tracking her down." While Randall shook hands, and called her _ma'am_ , Sam watched Pamela's mouth tighten, as if in disapproval or fear.

Pamela led the two young men into her workroom, through a bead curtain. Sam loved the noise of it, even as he stooped ridiculously so as not to hit his head: the wooden beads clinking like an abacus or a rosary -- belatedly he remembered Missouri's place, how he'd ducked through that curtain too, how she'd kept them both off-balance needling Dean and making Sam laugh. Maybe all fortune tellers had wooden bead curtains.

Missouri never had a glass ball set in the middle of a table, but Pamela sure did. This room was subtler, with floor instead of carpet, big stuffed chairs like you'd find in a shrink's office. Except for the glass ball. There was no art on the walls, no windows, just a few discreet lamps in the corners and a powerful sense of focus. Randall settled into a chair as he was told, while Sam stood behind him and watched.

"You want to sit, son," Pamela warned, but Randall looked up at Sam with such a hopeless expression that she grimaced. Sam put his hand on the back of the chair, not touching Randall, but available. He suspected not a lot of people had been available to Randall in his life; he'd grown up with a taciturn uncle, fixing old appliances in the back of a television store. His whole idea of the world seemed to come from the objects he handled and the stories those objects told him. It wasn't a way to learn about life.

"So, where should we look?" Randall asked.

"Her name is Nell," Sam supplied. "I have some things of hers she feels strongly about, if that would help."

Hard fingers hovered over the crystal ball. It was lit with a tiny bulb, small enough it almost disappeared in the base of the thing -- almost. "Okay, dear, now just be still and let old True Sight think, will you?"

Sam watched the crow's feet around her eyes, noted the osteoporosis in how far forward her shoulders slumped. She pursed that mouth, the cigarette gone now and her expression all business, while Randall swallowed and waited. She didn't have much sense of the dramatic, which as these things went might mean there was some real stuff in there somewhere. Certainly, Missouri had flapped her wrists at ceremony like so much claptrap.

"Looking for a girl," she said, eyes still closed. "I don't do dating services, boys; just cause she's pretty don't mean I can find her for you." Randall put his hands on the table, eager, nervous.

They were practical hands, narrow with long, bony fingers. There were clear calluses on the heels of his palms and the edges of his fingertips, from the tools Randall held all day. His skin was very white: an indoors boy. His mouth hanging open, he waited on every word that might guide him. Of course he wouldn't recognize the techniques of cold reading when he saw them.

Pamela whipped her head around suddenly, as if hearing something, but her eyes were blind to the room. "Oh, ohhhh," she moaned, trembling, and Sam had to commend her acting. She drew her hands back from above the crystal ball as if it had burned her, and it winked out. Blank, she mumbled, "That aint no girl."

Sam tensed. "You found her."

She squirmed, dry-washing her palms, and regarded him standing in her living room as if he were a giant cockroach. "I did no such thing," she announced, and stood.

"You didn't? What did you find?" Sam asked, stepping around Randall's chair. She withdrew from him subtly.

"I'm afraid the Sight isn't working today, boys. I'll please you to come back later."

"What did you find." Sam loomed over her, chin nearly touching his chest. Randall looked up at him, terrified. "We won't leave until you tell me."

Pamela True Sight was not used to being played. Stricken, she sank back into her chair. "It's never much, you know?" she muttered, and firmed her jaw at Randall. "I got the sight, that's the Lord's truth, I just don't got enough of it to do nothing about nothing."

Crouching, Sam put his head below her level and raised his chin at her. He let her see him not moving, not approaching any closer, demanding nothing but knowledge. "We've got to save her. Please tell me what you found."

Pamela shielded her eyes as if she stood in full morning glare. "I just felt it, something horrible. Like black gauze all around me, like a cold web." She began to cry. "You boys are in such trouble."

"We are?" asked Randall, and you could see the whites all the way around the pupils of his eyes.

Sam knew the answer to that one. He stood, and gestured to Randall. "We should go now. Miss True Sight wants to be left alone. Let's go get some lunch and we can talk some more."

"Okay," said Randall, like a child. "Whatever you want." Sam led him by the hand toward the door. He pushed Randall out into the waiting room, and turned to see Pamela staring at him balefully from her chair.

"For crying out loud," he asked, "Why do _I_ scare you?"

She turned away from him to say it: "You got an echo, son. You make my head hurt." Sam retreated quickly.

He crossed the parking lot at a jog: Randall was standing next to the Impala, chatting with somebody. Breathless, Sam arrived, and realized belatedly that it was Shaniece, her spirit realer and more solid than ever in the bright daylight.

"You're getting better at that," Sam told her, and she smiled.

"I was trying to teach Melvin how to do it. He is having trouble wrapping his brain around the idea of leaving his body behind voluntarily." She had queued her short hair into twists, and they bounced around her face as she shook her head. "Scientists."

Sam shaded his eyes to see her better. It was a piercingly bright fall day, hot like summer but less humid, and the reflections off storefront windows jabbed at Sam like daggers. They began to swim suddenly, turning to neon, and he had just time to put out a hand towards Randall when he whited out completely.

Sam woke up with his feet in the gravel and his head in Randall's lap. "Oh Dean," Shaniece moaned, standing above them both. She reached out to touch his forehead, and Sam felt something like a feather at his hairline. "Why didn't you say it was that bad?"

Randall was pressing one hand on Sam's breastbone, heavy. "It's not your fault," he repeated, low. "It's not your fault."

Sam stirred. "What isn't?"

Randall snatched his hand away. "Uh, I don't know. Whatever. That's what you told me last night, when I woke up screaming."

There was something important in that. Sam puzzled through the aftershocks of pain for it, but he couldn't drag it forward. "Ngh. Get me into the car. You're driving."

Shaniece protested, "Dean, you're not --"

He groaned as he came upright, fighting nausea. "Call up Melvin. Call him, Randall. No, get me in the car first." Randall was clumsy, afraid. He pushed Sam into the car and then slid in next to him, so Sam was in the driver's seat after all. Shaniece floated through the side door and into the back seat, and he felt her feather-touch on the back of his neck, reassuring.

Randall was sitting there in the passenger seat with Sam's phone in his hand. He didn't know how to work the phone book feature, and was stabbing buttons helplessly. Sam was suddenly really glad Randall did not yet know about the secret trunk in the back. "Shani," he mumbled, "Melvin was onto something. Ohhh what was it." Sam wrapped his own hand around his forehead, like a fence herding an animal onto a train. "Candy has the migraines, just like me, but she sees things. What's the point of my having a vision if I don't have a vision?"

"It's getting worse," Shaniece mourned.

"No it's not," Sam gasped. "It's been like this since I met you."

Shaniece asked, "If you're not having the vision --"

"Who is?" Sam puzzled through his misery, and didn't like the possibilities.

The phone rang in Randall's hand, startling them all. Randall answered it with, "Melvin? Oh." Sam listened, his eyeballs like cooked onions in his head, as Randall said hello to Candy instead. He didn't know Candy at all, just her name and what she could do. There hadn't been time, since finding him, to introduce him to everybody.

"Candy's the other seer," Sam told him flatly.

But Randall wasn't listening to Sam. "Don't cry," he said. "It's okay. It's not your fault." Randall held the phone, listening, as Candy described what she had seen.

***

Usually, Sam takes the lead with clients. It just happened, somehow, during the first months Alvin had him in the shop: people hew to Sam unconsciously, to his glib speech and his looks, as they do not to Alvin's slow gentle shyness. Alvin calls it magic, a word Sam doesn't like, but both of them recognize that it brings in business. So Alvin can tell something is up when Sam begs off talking to the man waiting in the office.

"I just don't like the guy," Sam explains, lame. He can't dredge up a better reason. Alvin rests his forearms on his pot-belly and cocks his head.

"All right," Alvin says, scratching his beard. They are conferring in a corner of the garage, the office door open. The client is standing by the bookshelves, suit jacket open and hands on hips, carrying his body in a way that is naggingly familiar. Sam keeps his head down and his body out of the direct light. Alvin glances at the guy. "You think he's an undercover cop?"

It is the word _cop_ that gives Sam the image at last. They see cops all the time; there is no cop in California that doesn't harbor some kind of CHIPS or _Bullitt_ fantasy as soon as he makes the kind of grade that allows for a second car. That man standing in the office, the way he weights his body to account for something hanging from his left side, something he's not wearing right now or else he wouldn't let his jacket open. That man and his workaday suit, and his white socks and shoes built for running rather than an office. That man and his sense of authority, the way he is snooping despite the owner being able to see everything he does. "Oh, man, he's a federal agent."

Alvin walks them around subtly, so Sam has his back to the office. He asks, very seriously, "You want me to get rid of him?"

"No," Sam says instantly, and then thinks it over. "No. Now I know why he bugs me, it's not -- a big deal. Hide in plain sight, right?" That gets a very shaky chuckle from Alvin. "Go ahead. We need the business." He wants to bullshit his way through this problem, just wing it, and then iron control comes over him from somewhere: he will not gamble with his family's safety.

"You stay out here while I talk to him." Alvin is stalwart, blunt. Sam likes him immensely all over again. He claps Sam on the shoulder and heads back in to deal with Secret Agent Man, as if he still ran the business alone, as if Sam weren't the reason the garage's mortgage is back in good standing and the paint job guys are happy to fit him into their schedules. Sam's got a few ideas about drawing in a younger crowd, guys who might want to learn as well as get the work done, and pay for the lessons. He hasn't planned it all out for Alvin yet, but maybe they'll have to have a talk some time soon.

In the meantime, Sam does as he is told, and hides his face against the wall as he washes brake fluid off his hands.

Jo hates what the rough soap does to his hands; she keeps threatening to make him use some kind of moisturizer, so he smells like a girl. Sam is chuckling to himself at that as he glances at the Wall of Fame over the sink. He's a little flattered to see the Impala up there; he's said a hundred times it was Dean did most of the work. But Alvin says it's good for business: proof that old cars are tougher in a wreck than new ones. Sam explained about reframing the poor old beast, because, with a hit like that it'll never align true; but he doesn't tell Alvin that the new frame is off a '66 Caprice. It was all Bobby had, at the time.

The Wall of Fame has a lot of stuff, dating back to Alvin's own first, a 1970 Cougar. It's just coincidence that two photos are eye level when you're washing your hands: the Impala looking like Godzilla went nose-picking in her, and then the same girl restored in all her glory: fresh shining paint, new chrome, glinting in the late sun, coronas sparking off the side mirror and the windshield. And leaning against the hood like they belong there: Sam and Dean, side by side. Dean in flannel shirt, hands in his pockets and hanging his head like he's shy to get photographed, and Sam beside him, wearing Dean's leather jacket, staring bluntly forward.

Sam forgot that Bobby even took pictures, till they arrived in the mail last year, from Ellen. How she got them he still doesn't know.

While he is looking at the pictures, they seem to grow and move, weird in his vision. He dimly recognizes that his hands are clutching the edges of the sink as he watches Dean stand up off the edge of the Impala. Dean reaches out and is clutching Sam's arms, hard, shaking him, voiceless mouth saying something rough, something like _evil bitch_ , but Sam doesn't know what. There are shining rainbows and coronas around Dean's look of rage, and he looms enormous, more than a foot taller than Sam. He slaps Sam across the face, and Sam feels that impact, a hot handprint and the sting like an afterthought. His head goes flying and around him is not the garage at all, but an apartment -- there's a table in front of him that Sam bangs his face into, a table with bills, there's an address, there's a name. It is a girl's name, a girl's apartment in -- Wisconsin? Sam is hands and knees on the floor and feels long fingers grabbing his shoulders from behind, lifting him, fingernails digging in painfully. Dean is going to kick his ass, and Sam doesn't even know why.

The drawer in Alvin's office bangs shut and Sam snaps out of it. He is standing there, bent over, his weight supported on his hands where they grip the sink. It has been only a moment. His face is less than three inches from the photo of the fixed Impala, and Dean is leaning on it, shy.

Carefully, Sam controls the shaking of his hands and rinses the soap from between his fingers. He pushes the hallucination out of his head by brute force and memorized Led Zep lyrics, and turns off the tap.

Secret Agent Man is still talking with Alvin, holding out his hands like measuring an engine in the air. More engine work -- well, somehow the whole thing stayed afloat before Sam came along. He is pleased to see that Alvin isn't helpless without him. He can be helpful without being responsible for the whole shebang.

On his way home that afternoon, Sam works it over in his head, trying to figure why Dean would kick his ass. Aside from the everyday stuff, that is; this hallucination is way more of an ass-kicking than toothpaste in the shampoo bottle deserves. He walks mostly, or if the leg is bad he takes the bus; he leaves Jo the car in case she wants to do something during the day. And anyway, it's her car.

She's got Betty in the highchair and Cheerios all over the floor when Sam gets home. He chuckles and goes to fetch the broom. "She get fresh with you?"

"Don't _even_ start," Jo snaps, banging a bowl of mashed bananas onto the counter. "I cannot wait to get into work to deal with slobbery drunks all night. At least they pay me, man."

Sam sweeps up Cheerios idly, grinning. "That's my girl," he croons. "Fight the power." Betty brings up both fists above her head like she is declaring victory, and shrieks with glee.

"It is so not my fault if her first word is a swear," Jo grumbles, crossing her arms. After a minute, she can pick the bananas back up and start shoveling them into Betty's mouth again. Betty is hummingly happy to eat bananas, and doesn't throw anything anywhere. Sam puts the broom away and plucks stray Cheerios off her forehead. She kicks rhythmically, banging the underside of the tray, and reaches out for the spoon in her mother's hand.

She is such a little thing, all enthusiasm and no sense, turning her goofy smile towards anybody like a flower towards the sun. Sam lets her grasp his thumb and wave it around and suddenly finds himself shuddering, for no reason.

"Eat up, bunny," Jo chants, feeding bites to Betty. "Grow big, and your daddy and I can go hunting again. Theeeere you go, sweetheart."

Sam extricates his thumb from his daughter's grasp. "We can do what?" he asks, dumbfounded.

"Yes," says Jo, still sing-song, like baby talk. "Mommy spends all day at the library, doesn't she? She's found plenty of interesting things." Betty finishes up the bananas while Sam sits immobile in front of her. Jo gives her a hard cookie, and Betty gums at it, eyes wide.

Sam rubs his face a couple of times. "No," he says. "We're not -- no." He doesn't even know where to start, just a stifling No all through him and over him.

"Not, like, now," Jo tells him, and she's back to an adult voice. She leans against the counter, confident. "But in a couple of months, after her birthday, when she's sleeping through the night, we could strap her into her car seat and park you on the roof with a rifle, just like old times."

"No," he says again, and discovers he is standing up, shaking a little. "Now we've got Betty, that's it, it's over."

"Says who?"

"Says me," Sam snaps at her. "Says your dad getting killed and leaving your mother to raise you alone."

She colors. "That is a hell of a thing for you to say to me."

Sam's hands are fists. He can feel his pulse in his neck, thrumming hard. "No," he tells her, "Not now, not ever. We are safe in this life, Jo. What the hell do you want, to tear it all to pieces?"

"I want to hunt," Jo says, arms crossed. "I'm good at it, and you are too."

"Not ever," he shouts, and watches her flinch. "This family is safe and it is going to stay that way."

Betty busts out a wail, frightened by his voice. He is panting with the anger of it. He suddenly knows what he saw this afternoon at the sink: it's a memory, it must be, from when Sam was possessed and threatened the family and Dean kicked his ass into next week. Sam does not know what he would do if he could not trust that his family is safe. He watches Jo crouch to comfort Betty, blowing on her cheeks and in her eyes, and realizes he has been yelling at his wife like some kind of lunkhead.

He doesn't know what to say, so he busies himself in chores: cleaning up the bananas off the tray, pulling Betty out of the highchair. He clutches her to his chest as if unseen forces might reach out suddenly and rip her away. She claps a moist hand against his face and the acid churns in his stomach and when Jo lifts the baby out of his hands he doesn't resist for fear he might crush Betty in his grip. Jo leaves the room, Betty's babble trailing after her, and after a minute of hard breathing Sam follows. He stands in the doorway to the bedroom watching his wife put down his daughter in the crib, cooing at her.

The muscles in between his ribs twitch and ping, tense. His hands dangle on the ends of his wrists. Jo stands up, leaving Betty with some kind of chew-toy in hand, and faces him again. She is not afraid, not the way he is afraid.

Jo comes up close, puts one hand on his chest. "I love you," she says. "I would never do anything to hurt this family."

They don't talk like that, they never have. Sam scrambles to manufacture something flippant: "Except for your cooking."

She swats him. "Liar." She goes up on tiptoes and kisses him, and that is something he understands. His fingers slide around her waist, dip under the edge of her jeans. Her arms go hard around him, elbows locking on his ribs, and they stand there kissing like teenagers in the doorway of their bedroom. "You love what I got cooking."

This Sam cannot deny. They eyeball the clock and stumble together out towards the living room couch, hurrying before Jo has to leave for work. As he unsnaps her bra, Sam convinces himself that the argument is over.


	18. Helter Skelter

Afterward, Sam would feel guilty for not thinking of Ava as a person, most of the time. He had stowed her engagement ring in the cigar box in the Impala, and the friction of her inexplicable absence had dulled as things had gotten more complicated. He had only known her for a day, for all that; and he fenced away his responsibility by reasoning that he must not be the only person looking for her. At present, he was too busy sneaking around the back side of her apartment building, hoping that Candy's vision had provided enough intelligence for their plan to work.

It was a rickety thing, the fire escape, and wasn't pleased about taking his weight. But Ava had never met Randall, so Randall got to go in the front, and Sam was the cavalry. He peered in the window, feeling like an idiotic peeping tom, and realized with dismay that Randall had jumped the gun and was already in the apartment. He had a helpless-goof look on his face and a gas can at his feet and Ava had her hand on the door while she frowned.

Time hadn't been kind. It was not much more than two years, and Ava had heavy lines next to her mouth. From slim, she'd shrunk to skeletal. Her hair was brittle and dull, uneven lengths around her face. Randall was so alive by contrast, gesturing expansively with his hands, shoulders hiked up around his ears, gangly and eager.

Making up lost time, Sam climbed out to hang off the edge of the fire escape and get a look in the other window. That room wasn't lit, and from the glow of the main room he could only see rough shapes: a bed, something like a desk, a chair. Someone in the chair. Sam banged his knees hard vaulting back over the railing.

Inside the apartment, Randall was explaining something with eye-rolls and _you know_ s, edging his way around for a good view and to keep Ava with her back to the window. Sam waved to catch his eye and gestured toward the darkened room. Randall flipped the back of his hand at Sam, and kept talking to Ava. Stupid boy.

While he worked at the lock on the window with his mumblety-peg knife, Sam kept an eye on Randall. Ava's face was turning cruel, as if she had twigged to the ruse. Sam freed the lock and began inching up the window sash just as the second person came into the room.

It was Nell Mackey, of course, dishwater hair and round hips. She walked right up to the window Sam was opening and ripped the sash up, out of his fingers, so that it gaped wide. "Why hello Sammy," she said.

Fuck. Randall was not supposed to know that name. He stood there, mouth gaping, while Ava stared bloody murder at Sam.

"Won't you come in?" Nell's body asked, and yanked at Sam's wrist. He came in, tumbling hard on his forearms, and found himself lying flat on the floor in front of Ava. That skinny body was even skinnier-looking seen at such an angle; she looked like a wired-together skeleton like you see in biology classes.

Randall at last remembered the plan, or what was left of it. He grabbed up the gas can and upended it over Ava, soaking her with holy water. She steamed and screamed, flailing. She only needed to connect once to knock Randall over. Sam took the opportunity and scrambled up to dash at Ava. She was all sinew under his hands.

He shook her, snarling, "You evil bitch, you helpless stupid girl," suddenly angry at her for being so nice and ordinary, for letting herself be grabbed away from the safety of her normal life. When he slapped her she sprawled backwards, grunting, and banged her face into a table beside the door. Mail scattered around her. Sam crouched and got his hands on her shoulders from behind, ready to shake the demon right out of her, but he'd forgotten about Nell. Nell had not forgotten about him.

For starters, she kicked him in the ribs. When he didn't stay down, she connected with the long muscles in his thigh, dragging a groan out of him. He inched away, cursing, leg cramped and useless, as the two women regained their feet and approached him.

Ava hung back with distaste and the blood from a split lip all over her features, but Nell was friendly. She sidled up to him, sly, to crouch in front of him and brandish her full breasts in his face. She straddled him, thighs firm against his, and gripped his jaw. The kiss was thorough and vicious and... actually, pretty hot. Sam's hands came up to grab her wrists automatically, but he couldn't pull her face away before she'd drawn blood in his lip. It was definitely Alice in there, or else everybody in the demon's employ was oversexed and bored.

"You have no idea what your brother and I have talked about," she purred into his ear.

Opportunity like an electric current streaked through him. "Yeah I kinda do," he whispered back. "He told me about seeing you in Hell. He said you looked like Laura Ingalls, only your pa wasn't nice."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Nell-Alice mused, and licked his face. "So if I fuck you, will you still be willing to deal?"

"I thought you didn't like giraffes," he needled. "If you go willingly back to Hell now, I can set you free permanently later. You know I have a reason to be working on that."

"Aw," she pouted. "No fucking?"

"I think whoever's in Ava would be jealous," he teased. "She doesn't seem to like Randall much at all." Nell-Alice twisted her head to get a look at Ava, sending her hair flying into Sam's eyes. Sam took the opportunity he was given, and shoved her off.

He struggled to his feet, panting, his thigh a knot of tension. Randall was in the corner, nose bloody, holding the empty gas can like a weapon he might not dare use. Probably he had never hit a woman before. Sam hadn't thought of that.

They stood like that, the four of them, two women with demons behind their eyes and two men preparing to do battle with them. Sam was gathering himself for another assault when the apartment door blew off its hinges and went flying across the room, breaking the windows. Even the demon-women gave yelps of shock, and Sam ducked behind a chair for cover.

The chair leapt away from him and towards Randall, bashing him in the kneecaps before careering away into the other room. Sam's skin crawled and then he was in the familiar position, the back of his head banging hard on the wall as his body was mashed backwards. He breathed hard, feeling the barrier of magic, as a body stepped into the apartment.

It was not an impressive body. It was a stooped, elderly woman with swollen ankles and glasses on a chain around her shoulders. Her hair was thin white wisps waved around her face. Her eyes were yellow with red streaks. Her smile curled, like the still-warm ashes of a burned letter.

"Sammy." That mocking voice, familiar even in a higher register. It could not find those rumbling deep tones of John Winchester, not in that body. "Long time no see. Why am I not surprised you're leading the rescue squad?"

Randall squeaked, pressed like Sam against the far wall. The two demon-women were standing up, dusting off their knees.

The old woman paced around the room, assessing the mayhem they had wrought. The body was obviously stiff and arthritic, and just as obviously the monster within it was forcing it to do things that would be painful, even debilitating, later. Sam remembered the thing in Dad's battered body, how Dad had fought it and fought it and begged Sam to shoot him. Gnarled fingers flexed and stretched, as if the demon were feeling the air.

"I know what you're doing, Sammy my boy," the demon told the room in general. "I know everything you do. Don't think you can hide from me."

Sam held tight to his cold terror. That was three other specials, Ava, Nell, Randall, who had heard his real name, though of course Ava knew it already. That was one mother of a demon, who claimed to know the whole story. Sam mustered in his memory the look on Dean's face when he sassed true evil, tried to mimic that.

The demon was sidelong, insinuating. "I'm sad you aren't acting on the information I give you any more. Well, I mean, you're here, aren't you?" She reached out and caressed his chin, while Sam jerked to get away. "But I had to goose you and Candy both to get you to come, didn't I? What kind of manners did your father teach you, not accepting a gift that's been offered you?"

Tiny victory, like the Pacific upwelling in his chest, but hot, volcanic, a blush of relief. The demon did not know _everything_. He didn't realize -- or didn't care -- that he'd just explained where the visions came from. He didn't even know Sam wasn't seeing the visions any more. Sam took a breath and plunged in: "Can't you make those things come without migraines? Kind of cramps my style."

"Not convenient for your oh-so-busy social life?"

The grin on Sam's face was pure Dean, pure bravado. "At least you're nice enough to schedule them for when I'm not driving."

The demon's borrowed face made mock-concern. "Don't want you to die, sweetie. Not before your time."

"I don't think you do want me to die," Sam needled. "Every one of us who dies is safe from you. Nestor won, when he killed himself. Even poor crazy Max, he was so unhappy, but he managed to keep you at bay in the end."

The demon raised his elderly chin at Sam, peering. "I _can_ kill you, sweet thing. It just doesn't profit me. _So_ much better if you play by my rules. So much easier."

"I don't feel like playing."

"No, playing is your brother's strong suit, isn't it? I saw him poking around in my back yard. You've been very clever, the two of you, never in the same place at the same time. But I'll break you of him." The demon put an owning hand on Ava's hip while she stared, hateful. "I always end up having to take away my children's toys. They get so attached; it's pitiful, really."

Sam breathed in and out, feeling the unpleasant truthfulness of that statement. And then, a steady, low anger: Dean was not a toy. He knew in himself the ferocious territoriality of the older sibling, how much he hated that demon for laughing at his brother, rightly or wrongly. It was overwhelming, made him shake, and the pictures on the walls rattled in their frames to speak his rage for him.

"Aw," said the demon. "You _do_ have a little power."

The barrier of magic squashed Sam a little harder against the wall, banging his head again. He struggled to drag in a breath against it. But there was something in him unconcerned, confident, free: that thing did not know where Dean was. That thing did not know, and Dean was safe, and Sam could withstand anything with that knowledge. For the first time, the demon's borrowed face showed apprehension. Sam let the rage in him flow freely, and a wooden chair flew into flinders with a look. The demon took two or three slivers of wood in the back, and turned to show him the bloody entrance wounds, grinning.

 _There's a person in there_ , he reminded himself.

While the demon's back was turned, Nell-Alice shifted subtly, cocking her hip at Sam. He twitched his mouth at her and she smiled that low, cruel smile. It was the same smile on every mouth she used; Sam wondered if he had looked like that when she had owned his body. "Hey guess what," Nell-Alice said, in that sardonic tone of hers. She began to recite in Latin: the ritual for exorcism.

"What the fuck are you doing?" asked the demon in Ava.

The demon roared at Nell-Alice, a terrifying noise far louder than the weak human body he inhabited could make. She paused, shuddered, and kept reciting. Sam mouthed along with her, and then out loud, and on the far wall Randall chanted along too. Sam realized suddenly that, in a luck-child's body, Alice was as safe from the demon's wrath as she could possibly be. Don't want to kill off your precious children -- the old woman's body grabbed Nell-Alice hard at the upper arms and kicked her in the shins.

"Oh, sweet thing," the demon said, as he collapsed her knee and sent her yowling to the floor, "you are going to _pay_."

And like that, with the feeble scream of the body it was leaving behind, black smoke leapt out into the room and billowed against the ceiling. It wafted, terrifyingly conscious and malevolent, out the broken windows.

The demon possessing Ava ran at her sister, clawing, but Sam plucked himself off the wall where he had been glued and captured her, kicking and squealing, before she could get to Nell-Alice. "Don't," screamed the creature using Ava's mouth, "you can't, I just got here, this is _my_ body now --"

"You owe me so hard, dude," said Nell-Alice, looking up at Sam through her lashes. She struggled to her knees and recited the last phrase, and out of her mouth came the same foul, mobile smoke that flew out of Ava's body.

Ava flopped in Sam's arms like a bag of sticks. He eased her to the floor, saying her name, but realized after a moment that she was unconscious, as was Nell on the other side of the room. Randall was crouching in the corner, blank and gasping.


	19. When the Levee Breaks

Sam carries around the rage of it with him all day, slamming tools down and hurling screws into their jars so hard they bounce right out again. Alvin doesn't say anything about it and by late afternoon Sam is feeling stupid and ashamed. He walks home with his hands in his pockets, wondering what to do next. When he gets to the house, he sees that the notebook is still on the table, just as he left it this morning, its pages ripped in half and scattered in a heap. Jo is in the living room, watching TV.

He rattles around the kitchen like a dried pea in a jar, pulling out something instant for dinner and wincing over the dishes. Jo sits in the living room and doesn't look his way, and after about five minutes of the silent treatment, he stomps in to see her, mad all over again.

"Okay, so I kind of went Hulk Hogan on the book," he allows. "Did you have to leave it out for me to find it like that, at six in the morning?"

"I was looking at it, after work," she bites out, still staring at the TV. "I just forgot it. You fucking left it that way for _me_ to find when _I_ got up."

Sam's head is heavy. His whole body is heavy. He thought he wanted to fight and now he just doesn't want to. "Where's Betty?"

"Late nap. I'm off today." Sam goes in and glances at her, and somehow that sets Jo right off. She is up off the couch in his face, asking,

"So, what, are you gonna take all my books away from me? Keep me out of the library so I can't look stuff up? Take away the keys so I won't stash things in the secret space in the car?" She hisses her anger, teeth clashing between her full lips.

Sam puts his hands up, finds himself grasping her forearms. "I am sorry about the goddamned book, okay?" he whispers.

"It's all I have," she gasps, and he's afraid she might bust out crying. "That notebook is everything I have to work with. All the rest of it is locked up in your head and you've thrown away the fucking key."

"Oh," he growls. "This _is_ about the hunt. We talk and talk and you just go and do what you wanted anyway."

Jo drops her head back, exasperated. "I didn't do anything!" She tears her arms out of his grip and paces into the kitchen. She slaps the pages on the table, lifts up a few to drop them, drifting, back down. "This is our whole life together, and you tear it in two."

He follows her closely, hot. "The hunting is the only thing you care about? What about Betty, for Christ's sake?"

"No. Sam," Jo sits down at the table and cradles her chin in her hands. "I can care about more than one thing at a time." She is staring out into nowhere and Sam is trembling. The next thing, he thinks, is that she'll ask for a divorce, but instead she says, "The stories you used to tell. I want to be a part of that. I want to hunt like your family used to hunt."

"That's crazy," he tells her. It is a frightening thing to say, because it's true and because it makes him feel like a traitor. Dad looms huge in his mind, Dad at the end of a hunt, worn out and full of sorrow. "It wasn't safe."

Her yearning is naked, all over her face. She reaches out one hand for him. "You loved it, babe. You used to love it. Why don't you love it any more?" And that only makes Sam feel more rotten. He must have loved it; saying he doesn't is like chopping off his own arm, but it's like cutting out an infection too. His throat closes down over the contradiction, like a burning house collapsing and smothering the flames with its own destroyed roof. He can't make sense of it.

He hardens himself into sarcasm. "Oh sure. Raise Betty like I was raised." She recoils from him as if he had attacked her physically. "Head out on the road, felonies right and left, while the baby crawls around loose in the back seat of a car with no seatbelts."

Jo stands up and walks away. It's not that big a room -- hell, it's not that big an apartment -- and she stops in the living room, by the window. He watches her back from three yards away and burns with helpless anger. Jo sniffles and wrings her fingers, staring at the walls of the neighbors' building. "I didn't --" she begins.

It is the cruellest thing Sam can think of to say: "Maybe you should have married Dean instead of me."

Her shoulders bow and her head drops down and the crying starts in earnest. She just stands there, facing away from him, and sobs quietly, and no Winchester in the history of the universe has ever been able to continue an argument with a woman while she is crying. Sam shakes his head and pads across the room silently and stands behind Jo and touches her shoulders, shy. She shrugs him off, but it's only a token resistance.

"Hey," he says. "I didn't mean that."

Down her forearms go his palms, till her elbows are nestled into his and he can press his chest to her back and his cheek to her temple and be all around her, like a force field. His fingertips tickle her hipbones.

"I just," he says, directly into her ear. "Our job is to be safe for Betty. We got a _kid_ , Jo. No fooling. If you're gonna die, I don't want you dying for anything less than saving your kid."

Jo's face, reflected in the window, is an array of shadows: her mouth hanging open, her eyes deep in their sockets like owls watching from hollow trees. "I'm not gonna die," she says, around a hiccup.

Sam smiles against her hair. "Not if I have anything to say about it." Her body shakes while she works out the last of her sobs and he traces her flank, her thigh, up under her shirt to the edges of her ribcage. She is slim again, a shadow of her luscious pregnant body, active and lithe. He exhales slowly and tucks a thumb under her waistband.

Jo sniffles and doesn't say anything. His thumb slides lower, teasing along the top edge of her pubes. He listens to her breathe and can hear the transition point when it stops being crying and starts being that other thing. Which is his cue for reaching down with his middle finger and finding the spot that makes her gasp -- just like that. She throws her chin up and her shoulders against his and gasps again and digs fingernails into his wrist. Her lips are at his ear, hot mist against his throat and a flicker of tongue. She turns herself around in the circle of his arms and they are ripping off their clothes like shucks off an ear of corn.

***

Lillian told him later that the luck-children had been checking in with her all day, pinging her over email and dropping in with Shaniece's projection spell so often that Lil had to make it a game, to convince Jenny and James Mackey that they weren't going to be kidnapped by ghosts. But Sam didn't know that when he arrived, late, the Impala grumbling as it pulled into the driveway. All he knew was that he'd made it home, to _a_ home, and three more people were safe.

Randall and Ava were asleep in the back seat, leaning on each other. They had taken to each other instantly, as soon as Ava had opened her eyes and been really Ava again. They'd done a lot of crying together; he'd listened to it through thin motel walls. Ava had gained back a little weight, but not much, and Randall was always hovering near her, offering his coat. She wore it now, tucked over her shoulders.

Nell sat in the front seat with Sam, alert and practical. She could organize audio tapes so they never listened to the same one twice in one day, and could marshal takeout orders, shouting them across Sam's body at the drive-through windows. She had gone on the road before, of course, and somehow had guessed that Sam was like her in that respect. It was almost like having Dean in the car with him, or, casting backwards into his childhood, like being on the road with Dad, playing guessing games and learning to spell off the highway signs. He sat with Nell beside him for a quiet minute, just liking her presence.

"Your kids are inside," Sam told her at last. She bit her lip against the tears that swam down her cheeks. "They think Lillian is your sister. James told me that you keep them safe," he added.

Nell laughed a little, and let herself out of the car. "They better be in bed by now," she admonished the sky. She waited, though, while Sam reached back and nudged at Randall, and then gingerly at Ava. The two of them came awake slowly, and then startled together.

"We're here," Sam told them. He got out of the car and faced Nell over the roof of it. It gleamed in the moonlight, like a shield. "They're great kids," he said. "All Jenny could talk about was how awesome you are."

"Wish I was awesome enough not to get possessed and abandon them," she said, and as if surprised at herself she turned away quickly. Sam jogged behind her and they made it to Lillian's door at the same time, Randall and Ava straggling behind.

And it really was like coming home, a warm kitchen against the chilly March night and the burner under the teapot turned off just in time so it wouldn't whistle and wake the children. Nell spent a long time in the bedroom with them, while the rest of them stood around, awkward.

"Shani will be here in a little while," Lillian told them. "She's got a bunch of warding spells on the apartment that she's always dropping in to check on. This many of us together --"

But there had already been four of them together for nearly a week, quiet in the Impala. Well, that had its own kind of ward. Lillian made some kind of hot lemonade, and read off to them the Chinese characters on the side.

"Luck and safety," she said. "But that's hippie brand-name talk, I think. We grew up drinking this stuff, and it didn't keep my sister safe." She shrugged at Randall and Ava. "She was smothered to death. When I was nine."

"Oh hey, that's awful," Randall offered, always polite. "You know, when I was seven, my parents drowned down Tawney Lake. Guess we all got something like that, huh?"

Ava's loss was still fresh, of course. She hid her left hand, engagement diamond winking out like a light.They all had something like that, some pointless death that reshaped each life. Sam had two of them, three if you counted Dad's bargain with evil. Sam was trying to think up a joke that would not be completely inappropriate when Shaniece walked into the kitchen.

"You took your time," she said. "It's one in the morning, on the east coast."

They trooped into the living room and watched Shaniece refresh her warding spell. "That's her thing," Sam whispered to Ava. "She's a natural."

"Bully for her," Ava muttered. Randall touched her on the forearm, cajoling or chiding. Sam let her alone.

They got to watch as people winked in, by ones and twos, arriving for the meeting. Shaniece was the most solid person, almost palpable. Gertie and Therese had appeared hand in hand, unable to project themselves alone. Kira, and Freddy, and Candy, cautious Jeff and Melvin with disapproval all over his face, Doreen still in Vermont and Mike on Long Island: familiar faces all. Andy was last, beer in hand.

"I'd offer you one, dudes," he said. "But they're kinda like back in Oklahoma." Silly as it was, it was the perfect line to get them all laughing, break the tension of what was coming. Sam looked around the room and realized he was the only one who had met everyone in person.

Sam held Dad's journal on his knees, a lifetime of assembled searching and knowledge and fighting spirit. He turned the pages without touching them, just savoring the handwriting on each page, his father's letters sure even when the pen shook with rage or fear. The postcards were pinned into the latter pages, just with paperclips: five dead-drop postcards from Dean, three from Gainesville and two more from California. The message space on each of them was blank; Dean still had sense; but it was -- more comforting than Sam could ever have said out loud. Knowing that Dean was in the world, alive and well, maybe a little irritated with his brother for being a slacker about calling him back.

"So," he said, and they all fell silent. He squirmed a little under all that attention. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nell come in, tidying tears from her face, ready for business. "So we did a thing, and I think we scared the -- bad man. I know you're not all good with my calling him a demon."

Melvin crossed his arms where he sat, on the arm of Lillian's easy chair. (He was translucent, so it was kind of funny.)

"Anyway, after all this time of him chasing us, I think we have a chance to go after him for once. We knocked him off balance, freeing Ava and Nell. I don't think that's happened before and it freaked him out. But we have to act quickly."

Dull muttering, as the bodies and spirits re-settled themselves uneasily. Sam paged through Dad's journal to the later pages. "We have what happened at Spuyten Duyvil to go by, and the prophecy from the Sluice Gate. We've got skills, all of us, and we need to use them. We bring the fight to him, and we might be able to break free."

Doreen spoke up from where she stood in the corner. "I did a tarot the other day. On myself. It had the ten of swords -- that's a nasty card. It's a blindfolded woman walking through a maze of swords stuck in the ground. Kind of describes where I'm at," she added, shy.

Sam hadn't seen her since -- it couldn't have been two years. She blushed and smiled back at him.

"The spring equinox is next week," Kira pointed out. "That's all symbolic and stuff, right?"

Sam nodded. "I have a place in mind. We've got to do this now, or we might lose our chance."

"Okay," interrupted Mike. He was in a t-shirt, so Sam could see a new tattoo on him. It was a Devil's Trap, right on his biceps. That was actually a really good idea, Sam realized. "So we have the where and the when. But I sure as hell don't know how."

"We use the clues Sam has gathered for us." Shaniece rested her hand on Sam's forearm and it felt as real as if her body were there. She touched the journal's page where Sam had written it down: "Dozens of hands."

Unconsciously everyone flexed pale palms, upward or outward.

She continued: "special tears normal eyes, and the blood of one of us, given freely."

"So," said Gertie, blunt as ever. "Who's willing to die?"

Awkward silence. It was not something they had talked about, not as a whole group. Sam met Shaniece's eye and they kept their mouths shut together.

Nell burst into sobs suddenly. They were big, braying, ugly sobs, her whole body wracked. "I'll do it," she said. She stood helpless in the doorway as if expecting the executioner at that moment. "Lil, will you take care of them for me? I know it's a lot to --"

"No," Sam blurted, even as Lillian was falling on Nell, hugging her tight. "Not you," he said to the whole group. "Those kids need you."

With dismay, Sam looked all around the room, at the fourteen other people waiting expectantly on him. Somehow, instantly, they'd selected him leader, and wanted him to decide on their behalf. Of everyone there, he knew them all best. Melvin had his patients. Mike had kid sisters. Freddy was married and Kira had her parents and Randall and Ava sort of had each other and Andy had -- whatever it was that made him happy. Sam's mind leapt away from it, like the emergency signal in your brain when you touch a hot burner -- unreasoning horror at the idea of being the one to choose who would die. That kind of power, over another person's life -- Sam couldn't bear it. As the silence stretched, he saw a dull fear creep into one face after another. If he couldn't choose, they might have to make the decision themselves.

"It doesn't say die," he said at last. "Lots of rituals require token amounts of blood, not all eight pints."

Heads nodded. It was a palatable lie, even to those who had to be able to guess. These sorts of things didn't go down without a major sacrifice. A unit of platelets was not going to fit the bill.

"Okay," said Melvin. "We're going to need tools and we're going to need weapons. Let's do an inventory."

Sam let them get to the practical matters while he stared at the open pages in front of him. In the back of the journal, the pages were all his own handwriting, except for bits by Shaniece and one page of Randall's hasty scrawl. Sam flipped forward, turning the pages by hand. Everything was in the book, or if it wasn't and someone learned it, it went into the book. Sam wrote in it reverently, always had, but some of Dean's notes were of the "microbrew: weird but good" variety. He took after Dad, of course. The early pages were part confessional, part manifesto, part instruction manual, and partly a real journal, with receipts and grocery lists amid the Latin. Sam stopped on the page he'd been looking for: the summoning spell. It was in John's handwriting, of course, or anyway the ingredients list was. It was on hospital letterhead from the place where John had died. Sam had taped it in there, and tracked down the wording of the ritual based on its ingredients.

"Does it seem like that'll work to you?" Randall whispered to him, slow. "Blood, tears and hands? There's got to be a twist."

"It's not twist enough that somebody's got to die?" Ava was sour, rubbing her ring back and forth on her finger.

"No," said Sam, "I guess it's probably not."


	20. Throwdown

They came together to the four corners of the earth -- well, the four corners of the country, because there weren't any Canadian luck-children that they knew of. It was actually the Four Corners National Monument, in the southwest, and Sam chose it because it was a physical crossroads, the largest he could think of that wasn't actually paved into a highway. It was also far enough away from anything else that if things went really bad, there wouldn't be a lot of bystanders. By fiat, Sam assigned himself Arizona; there were enough of them that three at least could come from each corner. There were fifteen in all, fifteen of their number, including angry Ava. Each one arrived as the sun was setting on the equinox, armored in his or her own strengths, personal magic, as Binney Washington had fifty years ago.

Sam looked them over. They were the craziest-looking band of superheroes ever assembled: a grandmother's quilt doubling as a cape; henna on hands and feet; a cheesehead covered with autographs; a hockey stick with rosaries wrapped into the tape; lucky pencils tucked behind ears; and Andy had taped a Star Wars poster to the back of his t-shirt -- he'd laughed a little, said he didn't know what else he believed in. Jeff had prayer cards pinned to a vest, all around: fluffy clouds and rainbows and doves and prayers in gold-plated script. Mike from Long Island wore a Mets cap inside-out, rally-style, with photos of his sisters tucked into the band. There were pennies in pockets, and shamrocks, and horseshoes, and mirrors slung around necks. Ava wore her engagement ring, still stained with dried old blood. Everyone had something. Shaniece was the last to appear, beaded as Sam had never seen her: when the necklaces had stopped fitting around her neck, she had wrapped them around waist and ankle and wrist. Even in spirit format, she tinkled when she moved, like a walking musical instrument.

Randall bounded up. He and Ava had driven all the way out here in person. "Who are you?" he asked.

"It's me, Dean," Sam said. "I know, I look different. This is my magic."

Sam wore no special token. As he had prepared to send himself to Four Corners, he had cast around him for a talisman he could use, some symbol of his life and the importance of it. There was no one thing: just him, his body, his life, his bonds. The Dean in him was the magic he used.

"You're kinda -- hot," Lillian teased him. Sam chuckled wryly.

They were in this together, so they all of them, in a line holding hands, jumped over the broom Melvin had arranged at the approach to the monument where they would do their magic. That was his magic, Grandma magic, he called it, and Mike teased him that now that meant they were all married to each other.

"Yeah," replied Shaniece. "We're one spirit bound to cast out another."

They settled themselves in their four camps, one to each state so they faced the actual spot of the Four Corners. It was kind of a bare space, just concrete and the little intersecting lines showing where the four states met. The visitors' station was shuttered and dark; nothing but parking lot and dust for miles around. As the night grew crisp, Sam tasted the clear air and thought of Binney and Martha Washington, not four hundred miles from here. The sky was enormous and purple above him, the visibility seemingly infinite.

Nell marked in chalk the six-line figure, drew the circles at the ends like denuded flowers on stems. Sam watched her do it, watched Lillian prepare the acacia and the oils, and knew this was how his father had summoned the same demon. Lillian set the flame in its pot and they held each other's hands fiercely, all around the circle, like children. They said the summoning words in unison, like a gasp running through a crowd.

They summoned the demon, and he came without warning. He was just standing there suddenly, like a man, or like a woman, or like no person at all, just a shadow of a human shape, a parody without any convenient body to possess. One of his shade-colored feet spanned two states and the other spanned the other two. He was truly everywhere. Sam quailed inside, felt himself leaning back, felt the bonds around the circle groan.

Even so, even so, a little voice in his head said, "What is this, true evil, or David Copperfield?" That was the Dean in him, it had to be. Sam could not laugh at danger that way himself.

The terror ran through the group, and Gertie forgot herself completely. She wrenched her hands free of the circle and stood up. Therese, startled, stood with her, and they raised their knives together. "We gotcha now," she announced, dramatic to the last. She moved too quickly for Therese to snatch her back: she darted into the circle, right up to the demon, and pointed her knife at her wrist. "I'll give a little blood to get rid of your kind."

He did not bother to taunt her. The demon knocked her away with a flick of his wrist, and she flew back and skidded on the concrete. A flash of firelight startled Sam and he reached out with his mind to stop her knife two inches from his face. He let it drop and heard it clatter at his feet. Gertie gave a grunt on impact and Therese ran to help her. Melvin reached across the gap she had made and grabbed Sam's hand -- the circle healed itself.

With their sweaty palms touching, they held some kind of equilibrium, but that wasn't what they were here for. They did not dare begin.

Sam looked around the circle. Mike and Jeff and Doreen and all the others, those who were there in body and those who weren't, stared at Sam, afraid, waiting. He pressed his lips together and squared his shoulders and sat upright on the seal of Arizona. "We've come together," he called, and drew the demon's attention. "We've come together to cast you out. We fifteen, we don't want any part of you, and if you hadn't gotten all the rest, they'd be here with us too."

The demon blinked his yellow eyes, and grinned. It was a John Winchester grin, giving his shadowy face a shape, those old sideburns and the white on his chin, mockery thick on his features. But the real John Winchester was dead, and Sam could laugh at that face.

"We cast you out, man. We voted you off the island. We deleted you from our cell phones. We don't want you." Gertie was upright now, panting. She cleared her throat and spat into the circle. Sam kept his eyes forward, pushed her out of his thoughts.

"You," said the demon, and smiled. "Where are you hiding your brother?" He turned into Mary Winchester, and burst into unconsuming flames. Sam had seen that sight before too: it was a comfort, almost. It reminded him home and of all the people he'd helped. "Boy, you are _such_ a glutton for punishment."

"Guess so," said Sam, and leaned forward suddenly, feeling Dean's brass pendant bump against his breastbone. "Guess we all are."

"You think this excellent crop of young people will follow _your_ lead? You're a nobody." The yellow eyes grew or seemed to grow, red capillaries bulging, or no, it was the whole body growing, the shadow lengthening as if late afternoon had struck suddenly in the middle of the night. Sam felt tongue-tied, juvenile, small. He firmed his spine, reminding himself of his real size while the contempt dripped from the demon's lips: "I don't have any interest in nobodies for their own sake. I thought I taught you that last time."

Sam let go Melvin's hand and Andy's hand and pulled out his knife. Dean had given it to him, when he'd first learned mumblety-peg in the schoolyard. He had polished it till it glowed. He rucked up one sleeve and dug the point into his elbow.

But they all were forgetting the script -- Freddy just leapt at the Bad Man from where he had been sitting. He missed, flopping through the shadow, and landed on his face in the circle. Jeff followed up with a high-sticking, rosary-beads clattering as he swung. Lillian threw pine needles, and Gertie knocked Sam hard as she sped past, attacking again with her fists now her knife was lost. Blood popped from Sam's elbow, shocking. Everything was going out of control.

Not everything. Shaniece on the other side of the circle nodded at Sam and cut herself the same way. Kira saw her and pulled out her choice of blade -- it was a hatpin, and she stuck it into the back of her hand. Andy held up a butcher knife, and with a laugh as unserious as he'd ever been, he drew a bloody line on his forearm. One by one the circle remembered its task: Melvin straightened up and uncapped his scalpel. All of them blooded their knives and held them up, to show the demon what they were prepared to do.

Gertie fell back, raw scrapes on her cheeks and the heels of her hands. She held up her palms like all the rest: marked with her own blood. "We're all willing to die," she said, and laughed bitterly.

"Go ahead," said the demon. He loomed, enormous, over them all. Sam stared up at him, at his impossible height and authority, and felt the knife in his fist. His left arm ached, where he'd made the cut; it wasn't bleeding hard yet. It wasn't fatal. "Go ahead," boomed the demon's voice, and it echoed off the far mountains. And then the insinuating whisper: "Your father will know he failed, won't he?"

Sam shook, hard enough he pulled the knife away so he wouldn't cut himself accidentally. Binney Washington swam into his head, that old man with hollows instead of eyes and a wife he had been willing to die for. John Winchester, willing to die for his family. Gertie, throwing herself into the fray again and again. Nell's ugly, unselfconscious crying as she offered her life. Sam was holding the knife point outward in front of him, still shaking, and wiped the tears off his face with his bloody forearm. Something inside of him revolted against it all and said, "No."

He felt his pulse thrumming wildly, felt his hard breaths in counterrhythm, the knot in his middle and trembling readiness in every joint and sinew. His body would not surrender. "No," he cried.

Shaniece was staring at him. All of the luck-children were staring at him. The demon turned, vulpine, as if he might lick that moisture from Sam's cheeks, as if he fed off sorrow. "No," Sam sobbed again, with no idea where it came from inside him. And then in that silence that surprise had given him, he knew it the way he knew his own name: "I won't die for him. Shani, you were right." She wept, on the other side of the circle. "Dying won't save him. I'll live for him instead."

The knife fell from his hand and clanked on the concrete. Shaniece opened her mouth, and closed it again. She set her knife down.

It went around the circle, like gossip or like ripples of comfort: the knives went down and the murmurs went up, glinting steel like bits of wood collapsing in a bonfire, reflecting the flames everywhere. Someone said a name, and then they all were doing it, reciting the names of the people they lived for, whispers lifting like smoke into the darkness. Sam said nothing. He clapped his hands together in front of him, for prayer or attention he did not know. The demon was facing him, yellow eyes slitted now, and he crooked a finger that might mean something else awful. Sam didn't wait to find out.

He rushed the demon, stumbling to his feet -- _I am as tall as him, how can I be as tall as him?_ \-- and across the span of the chalked sigil and barrelling into the shadow, hands out. Gertie was there too, and Candy with flames in her hair and Nell, still bellowing the names of her children. The hands, all of them, reaching to grab and hold the demon here on earth, to make him sorry. Their fingertips and palms were red, all of them: marked with their own blood.

Doreen leapt for him and was on his arm, like a squirrel attacking a bear. The demon threw her off, but she landed on her behind and got up again, rushing back into the scrum. Sam found his hands on the demon's wrist, Shaniece's hands on that evil forearm, Melvin grabbing a leg and Randall beside him holding down a foot. Fifteen pairs of hands held onto him, wrestling the demon so he couldn't leave, and as they screamed and gasped and cried out their determination, something changed.

Sam felt it as a slickness under his grip, and he feared for one sickening moment that the demon would escape after all and live to poison another generation. But it welled up between his fingers and he saw it was black like crude oil, heavy, noxious and coating. The black ran, viscous and dripping, but it did not mix with human blood: it flowed away, downward, as if repelled by a magnet. The demon melted in all of their arms, groaned and bubbled and wept and melted, like the witch in the Wizard of Oz or like Jello in an oven. It was only a second or two, hardly any time at all, and then it was done and they all crouched together, panting.

It was night. The moon was high, ringed with luminescence in a cloudless sky. The mountains all around did not move, did not echo back the significance of what just happened. The fifteen pairs of hands hung there, empty, mired with crud.

"What the fuck was that!" bellowed Andy. "What the fuck was that!" Jeff clapped him into a hug, bellowing about God. They gave each other handprints all over, dirty red-brown handprints like they'd been rolling in mud. The sigil on the concrete was completely buried, or washed away, in that sea of gunk.

Melvin was on his knees, a clean handkerchief over the wound on his arm. "That was positive, right?" he asked, breaths stuttering. "We won?"

Sam hyperventilated where he stood. He couldn't think straight. It was Shaniece who ticked the prophecy off on her fingers. "Red hands, right? We've got two and a half dozen. Blood given not taken, that's the part we planned for. Not like that, I mean. The tears thing, well -- oh." She held up her sticky fingers at Sam. "You're the third thing, of course."

He was feeling cold around the ears at and his fingertips, which meant he really needed to sit down. "The what?" he asked, as he let himself to the ground. "You were crying too."

"The normal eyes. That's you." The others were regaining control of themselves, gathering around him. They stared down at him, in horror or awe he could not guess.

"But I'm just like the rest of you. I'm not a normal --"

"When you project, you look like a normal person," Shaniece breathed. She got down on one knee and put a hand on his chest, and under it he felt Dean's brass pendant. She put a finger to his lip, traced his chin: not his lip or his chin. "You look like your brother. Your tears, out of his eyes --" Sam whooped in a startled breath. Of course.

Gertie was the first to bust out laughing. Randall followed, and it was all laughter, and crying too. They stood and sat and crouched in their big messy circle under the moon, and knew they were alive.

"We'll talk later," Shaniece told Sam, her hand against his jaw. Her skin was so warm, so warm. With her free hand, she tapped at the big whorled glass bead she always wore. It was brown and black, like skin and hair, and Sam had never seen Shaniece without it at her neck after their first, hurried meeting. "My mom is waiting for me," she said, and grinned and grinned, her hand on that bead. Already the glass was beginning to soften and reshape itself, and Sam guessed at last that it would eventually grow back into the shape it had started out in: a middle-aged woman with a daughter who loved her. Shaniece touched him one last time on the cheek, and disappeared, and Sam did not wait more than a moment before following her.

Sam woke up. He was lying in the back seat of the Impala, parked in a Walmart parking lot in -- he didn't remember where. He was inside a Key of Solomon, drawn on the roof of the car. It was the closest thing to a talismanic safe space he could think of, and all of the warding that kept the car so powerful had kept him safe after all. The pendant was gone from around his neck: it belonged to Dean, not to him. The cut in his elbow was scabbing over already. Sam was sore and chilly. It was the middle of the night, and he lay there and laughed a little to get it out of his system. And cried a little, to get that out of his system as well. Out in the west, in the Four Corners, the few who had gone there physically would clean up the mess and set a fire and salt over it, like he'd shown them how. Just in case.

It was over, and Sam did not know how to think about its overness. He was 2,000 miles away from home, with the Four Corners spot in-between, he had a full tank of gas, and it was dark out. He fumbled around looking for a pair of sunglasses, to finish off the homage, but realized after a bit that the Blues Brothers always came in twos.


	21. Wild Horses

Sam wakes up, sweating and nauseous, to Betty's low wail. He has to listen to it for a long moment to place it in his mind: It's her noise for when she startles herself awake, nothing special, just not sleeping through the night. (Now or possibly ever.) He digs the sleep out of his eyes and sits up, hunching on the end of the bed, crossing his arms over his chest and nestling his palms in his elbows. He shivers, for no reason. He puts out a hand sideways to touch Jo's feet and they're not there.

It's four in the morning. He looks at her side of the bed and it's really empty. He pats down the sheets: cold, unwrinkled.

The linoleum is cool under his feet. The whole house is chilly, underheated in the California spring. Sam paces into the living room, knowing she will be asleep on the couch for some reason. She isn't asleep on the couch. She is not dead in a pool of blood on the floor and she is not in the kitchen frying bacon. She isn't in the bathroom, throwing up, maybe pregnant again. Betty is still crying and it is Jo's turn and she is not picking the baby up.

Betty is standing in her crib in the bedroom, gnashing her teeth together and waving one meaty fist. Sam snatches her up, holds her against his body, and she is hot, not feverish just hot like a baby's skin is hot. She takes her customary stranglehold on his neck and lets out a few last wails and chews on his undershirt. Sam wipes the sweat off his upper lip and tries to think.

There are a lot of places a pretty young woman in the greater Los Angeles area could end up at four in the morning, and none of them are pleasant. Sam cannot call the police, not yet. If she is possessed or something -- and where is her talisman? Sam is up across the room hunting in her jewelry box, and does not find her talisman -- then the police would be disastrous. He plops the baby onto the bed and fumbles on the floor for the cell phone in his jeans. He has not missed her call. She has not called.

He puts the phone to his ear and listens to it ring and ring. Betty is crawling in the sheets, flopping her head onto his pillow, chuckling to herself. She kicks Sam in the hip, calls out to him to play with her. Someone answers the phone.

Sam sits very still and listens to the phone. The person answering it has not said hello or asked who is calling. They breathe at each other and listen. "...Jo?" he asks at last.

"I'll be home soon," she tells him, and hangs up. That's all.

He can't play with Betty. He slumps into the bed next to her, his heart racing, and stares at the ceiling while his daughter slaps him on the forearm with her open hands, saying nonsense words. Jo is not dead, and will be home soon. Jo is not dead, and is out doing something in the middle of the night. Jo is not dead, and is --

He knows, of course. There is only one thing she would stay up after her shift to do, instead of in the morning. You don't hunt ghosts in the daylight. She has the car, so she has plenty of weapons, unless they're the wrong weapons and she doesn't know what she is dealing with. He doesn't know what she is dealing with. He crushes the phone in his hand and does not call her back.

Betty climbs over him, stabbing him hard in the belly with a toe, and settles down on his chest. Automatically his hands come up to her, positioning her on her stomach so he can feel her breathe. Her eyes fall shut and she returns to sleep, the way she always does after her midnight play sessions. Sam lies there on his back with a child on his chest, on his side of the bed as if there were a person on the other side, and waits for his wife to come home.

He listens to the house and to the slow wind outside as dawn wanders nearer. He stares at the ceiling, done in that cheap method they call _popcorn_ because it's not actually flat. There's a crack above the door, that radiates a little way into the room. It's not water-stained or anything, but it doesn't say good things about the foundation. Everything is painted white, blank so that when you have nightmares and then open your eyes the afterimages stay, reversed-color, right in front of you. He smells her on the sheets and listens and after a little while he hears the door unlock.

She is stealthy: shoes off, things put down carefully, probably on the couch. She strips in the doorway to their bedroom, balling up the clothes and stuffing them into the laundry pile. She climbs into bed in her underwear, carefully not touching him, curling up on her side. Sam just listens to her for a little while: her restlessness, her shallow breathing.

"What was it?" he asks, as casually as he can.

Jo does not roll over to face him. She tells the wall: "Angry ghost, I think. I didn't face it or anything. It was just recon."

Betty mumbles in her sleep. Sam touches her and she settles again. "The baby woke me."

This is enough to get her up on one elbow, pleading with him. "She slept the night through the last three nights. I swear, Sammy. I stayed up all night to make sure."

With his free hand, the hand she can't see because it is beside his thigh, Sam makes a fist. "You were gonna pull this off till I caught you."

She breathes out. "Yeah." There is something sulky in her voice.

He hisses, "I thought we talked about it."

"No, you talked about it. You laid down the law and didn't listen to me." The resentment in her voice rolls over him like molasses, heavy, stifling. He is suddenly certain that she will leave him, ask for a divorce. There is nothing he can do to keep his family safe without ripping it to pieces.

Blank terror overcomes him and he can say nothing. He feels a fingertip against his jaw, two fingertips: Jo is touching his pulse and can tell his heart is banging around in his chest like a genie in a bottle. He breathes in hard and out hard again, and Betty's weight on his ribcage is suffocating, horrible. He plucks at her forearms like twigs in a bog till Jo takes the baby off him. Betty moans and grumbles and settles against her mother's collarbone. Sam lies there sweating freely, aswim in adrenaline. He is glad he is already lying down.

"You don't want to lecture me?" she asks.

But he can't talk at all, holding himself still against that tsunami of fear, and after a little while she subsides and leaves him alone.


	22. Tell You a Little Story

And here they were, Sam and Sam, sitting in the front seat of the Impala like old times that never were. Dean drove gently, as if aware the car had seen bad times, and talked to it all the way home to his driveway. There was a battered old gray Japanese car in the driveway, but Dean just pulled on up behind it. He killed the engine and turned to face his brother with a simple happy sigh. "God, I missed this," he said.

"So did I," Sam told him. Dean took that as his exit line, opening the door and putting one foot out on the tar before Sam could stop him. "Wait." He had a bit of Dean's sleeve between his fingers. "I got something I need to talk about first."

"You gotta do it in the car?" Dean asked, smirking. But he slid back in and pulled the door shut.

Sam sat in the passenger seat, the sun slanting over his shoulder, and looked at his hands. He was still wearing the silver ring on his right hand; he never took that off. He wasn't sure he could get it over his knuckles consistently, so it stayed on. He didn't know how to start.

Dean asked, "Are our auras going to commune for a little bit, or you got something to say, Dean?"

"Please don't call me that," said Sam, but Dean wasn't really listening. "So, I was wondering," he went on, and on impulse he reached out and tugged gently at the pendant around Dean's neck, "whether that thing I gave you was any good against the visions you used to get." Sam waited for the answer on tenterhooks.

Dean blinked, cocked his head, and blinked again. "Oh," he said. "That's what those are."

HIs fear confirmed, Sam faced the windshield and swallowed hard.

"They were different," Dean continued. "For one thing, no headache. And, I don't know, I guess I thought they were hallucinations or flashbacks or something. Like they shoulda locked me up in a loony bin," he added, chuckling.

It wasn't the pleased kind of chuckle; the little lines around his mouth showed apprehension. Sam asked the windshield, "So you never -- I mean, you were okay with them?"

Dean tapped on the steering wheel rhythmically, beating out a drumline Sam did not know. He did it for a good few minutes, while Sam remembered that was one way Dean worked out how to say something difficult. But when he finally did open his mouth, Dean only said, "I been handling it."

"Handling it like handling it, or handling it like totally pretending it wasn't scaring the crap out of you."

"Aw, dude, I got enough in my life scares the crap outta me I don't need some leftover visions screwing me up too."

Sam went on alert. "Did you see something? What's going on?"

"No," Dean said, making a puff of air with his mouth as if to blow all Sam's anxiety away. "Nothing unnatural. All that stuff is over, you know that. Just ordinary life stuff. That's plenty."

Sam did not know what he meant. He sat there afraid, paralyzed, and suddenly it was like being at Four Corners all over again, with the demon standing tall and all of the circle ready to flee. "Life is pretty frightening," Sam agreed.

"Yeah." Dean squinted out the side window: clearly not something he wanted to talk about, or anyway not the first thing after two years' absence. Sam wanted to ask him a million questions about his life, like how Dean Winchester of all the people on the planet had managed to get married -- hell, _stay_ married. But the questions would only be delay, and Sam had delayed long enough. It was terrifying to start, like standing on the edge of a cliff.

He sat there in the car, sun streaming in over his right shoulder and glinting off the metal of the dash and the day bright and temperate. There was traffic in the background and the butt-ugly car further up in the driveway and an apartment building and a life, and a thirty-two year old man sitting in the driver's seat thinking he was twenty-seven. Sam said to the glove box, "I need to take you someplace. You're not going to like it." He turned before Dean could quip at him, and grabbed him around the wrist. Under his hand, he could feel Dean's warm skin, the serious muscle he still had. Of course: he worked with his hands.

It had become nearly routine, considering all the work Sam had done with the specials. He blurted out the incantation before Dean could ask him what was going on. The last words of it, Dean recited with him unconsciously, nodding vaguely as if it were a children's rhyme: "I went to Missouri and I learned the truth --"

They weren't in the Impala any more. But it wasn't the same as Sam had seen the last time; it was drab, plain, just undressed stone and dimness. The personal hells -- flames, iceberg, twister, hospital waiting room -- were gone. The people sat, still, waiting for their fates.

"Where the hell are we?" Dean rasped, spinning awkwardly, brows low. Sam had to stagger to keep their hands joined. Dean was a lot more agile in spirit format, and taller too. He had olive skin and a pointy nose and didn't look exhausted at all. Dean laughed suddenly: "Holy shit, man, you look like me."

Sam looked down. He was wearing the pendant around his neck, and in his short sleeves he could see freckles all the way down his forearms. "You are a handsome devil," Sam mumbled.

He tugged Dean along down the rows. He did not even stop for Alice, if she was there at all. He went straight in, three across and two down.

Dean did not seem to recognize him till they stood right there in front. John Winchester saw them approach and did the same thing he'd done before: stood up from the rock he'd been sitting on, and backed up two steps. He held his right arm to his side and frowned idly into the middle distance. Sam felt Dean's arm come tense under his hand slowly, like the sun rising. His voice wavered: "Dad."

Dad played stone-face. He was very good at it.

Dean got over the shock in a moment, and was stepping forward to do something about it even as Sam pulled him back. "No, dude, that isn't how it works here."

"Well how the fuck _should_ it work? We gotta get him out of there." Sam winced away from Dean's rage.

He pulled the journal out of his waistband, handed it to Dean and repositioned himself so he had a grip on Dean's neck without breaking skin contact. They had to be here together, for this one. "There's a word of unbinding in there somewhere, I know there is."

Dean held the book in his hands, pale. "A what?"

"I asked an oracle," Sam told both father and brother. "You can't break a deal with a demon till the demon is dead. And then you need a word of unbinding."

The smile on Dad's face was sardonic, disinterested. "Hadn't heard that one yet. I guess an old dog like yourself _can_ learn a few new tricks."

Sam had a whole speech he'd been rehearsing in his head, but then he saw Dean's hands trembling as he flipped through the front pages of the book. "We killed the demon two days ago, Dad. We did it. It's over. We can break your deal."

"Two days ago? What the hell are you talking about? What the hell is he talking about, Dad?" Dean asked. The pages stilled in his hands. Sam squeezed his neck and opened his mouth to explain, while Dad put his left hand over his right. While they all stood there, he yanked his broken arm straight with a horrible groan. The brothers as one jerked in misery.

"Come back tomorrow," Dad panted, "and I'll do it again. I'll let you break my other arm, if you want." And oh, that was the real John Winchester smile, that bulletproof grin with the deep furrows hiding his dimples. "You just don't get it. I would have done anything to keep my boys safe. You don't have kids. You wouldn't understand."

Sam had nothing to say to that. Under his arm, Dean stirred. "Yes I would," he rasped.

"Do your worst," said John.

"Did you find it?" Sam muttered. He nudged Dean, and the journal's pages wafted. There wasn't any point trying to argue with a ghost, and if Dean could think straight he would know it. There wasn't a whole person there, just a fragment -- just the determination and the endurance and the parts of him even death couldn't budge.

Dean grabbed a fistful of Sam's shirt and they leaned together, chests heaving hard.

"Is this it?" Sam asked, pointing to the page. "Can we let him go now?"

Dean looked at him, stricken, and looked again at Dad. Dad had gone back to ignoring them.

"Like yelling down a well," Dean muttered, and his face crumpled.

Sam laughed, bitter or relieved he didn't know. "You can still yell at me."

Dean's shoulders deflated, and he let go of Sam's shirt to put his finger on the words he was reading. "Right there all along," he said to himself, and then louder, so everyone would hear, "Disperse equals exsolvatur, exsolvantur. Keds size 12."

A thousand exhalations seemed to rise around him, mist, a last humid breath. Sam held onto his brother and felt Dean miserably grab back. Dad looked over his shoulder with an expression of surprise, at a reaper the living could not ever see, and faded into nothingness.

The entire cavern was empty. Every captive heard that word of unmaking, and was unmade.

"I don't think you had to say that part about the Keds," Sam said weakly, and wiped his face. Dean was shocky, a little greenish as if he might throw up or pass out.

He stared at the rock where Dad had been sitting and asked, "Sammy, what the hell is going on?"

And that meant the very last thing on the list was done, and it really _was_ over, and it was time for Sam to face the consequences. "In a second, Dean," he said, and recited the charm that brought them both back to their bodies in the Impala.


	23. Hide and Seek

And here they are, Sam and Dean, sitting in the front seat of the Impala like old times. Sam smells like his clothes have been worn by every homeless guy in the lower 48 and his eyes are red as if he hasn't slept. They're leaning together, Sam's arm heavy across Dean's back. The sun slants over Sam's right shoulder and pours into his lap and he's wearing the silver ring Dean hasn't thought about in -- oh. A bomb goes off inside his head.

Here is Dean, right where he's always been, a gold band on the ring finger of his left hand. He remembers having it sized, when he came into some cash from poker, so it would fit him properly. He remembers thinking of himself as Sam when he did that. Carefully, Dean swings open the car door and climbs out, flexing his bum knee automatically. He paces the ten steps up the driveway just like he always does, and unlocks the door with his key. The key breaks off in the lock as he turns it.

The door swings open, slow. Sam has said something, behind him, has come out of the car and is standing somewhere back there. Dean carries the broken head of the key into the house, perplexed, and sets it next to the mail on the kitchen counter. Safely inside, Dean finds both his knees are going bum on him, and he wilts to the kitchen floor like a tire that's popped its air valve. He sits on the floor, legs akimbo and hands pooled in his lap, and stares at this kitchen that belongs to somebody named Sam.

"You're early," calls Jo, from the other room, and then stops suddenly, hairbrush in hand, and looks at him on the floor. "Oh, honey," and she huddles next to him, "are you okay? Is it the leg?"

"It's not the leg," says Sam. Dean has forgotten and left the door open, and Sam must be in it. Jo raises her head all the way up -- of course, Sammy is tall -- and her fear is naked. Sam adds, "It's all over."

Jo grabs Dean's shoulders, nails digging into his skin, and then slaps him lightly on the cheek, frowning. "Is he okay? What did you do?" Jo asks, and Dean has no idea what she is talking about. She stands up, out of his range of vision, and he realizes she is talking to Sam.

"We said the word of unbinding," Sam says. He hasn't come any closer. "The spell on him ended."

Dean cannot stand up and he cannot turn around. They are literally talking behind his back and all he can do is sit there and count the linoleum squares between here and the bedroom. (There are twelve.) Some murmurs, high-pitched and then answered by a lower one, don't resolve into words. There are footsteps, two or three, and then something warm against his back. Dean inhales and smells Sam's sweat and the age of his clothes while Sam is tugging at Dean's legs, first one and then the other. He is very gentle with the right leg.

And then Dean is in the air, the room whirling around him, all the weight of him mashed to one side as Sam lifts him up. There is a hard grip behind his knees and another around his shoulder. The dizziness overcomes him and he turns his head away. Sam's chin is against his temple. With those long legs of Sam's, it's only a few steps to the living room. As he is setting Dean down, Sam says quietly, "I carried you into the hospital, do you remember?"

Dean does not remember. Sam arranges his limbs on the couch into something vaguely civilized, and then sits himself: they are side by side, like people waiting at a doctor's office. Jo is standing nearby, phone in one hand, telling her boss she has to take a sick day. She hangs up and tucks her empty hands in her armpits, as if she wants to reach out and touch him and doesn't dare. They look like ghosts, both of them.

"How long did it last?" For some reason, this is the only question he can think of to ask. He feels kind of like Jello, when it's sitting in the fridge and you can tell it's got a skin on top of it, but you don't want to move the cup in case it hasn't set all the way through and the slightest tremor makes it split through the middle like a flawed gem. He realizes he is, in fact, wobbling where he sits, and stills the trembling in his hands by force of will.

The answer is pretty slow in coming. Jo wipes her eyes, pretending that's not what she's doing. Sam plays with the silver ring on his hand. "About two -- two and a half years," Sam says. And immediately, "I didn't think it would be that long."

Dean is wondering silently how long would have been just long enough and Sam can't help himself. He has always been the talker.

"You were hurt so bad, Dean." Sam is hoarse. "It was so bad."

The leg. Of course. Dean goes over it in his head, trying to find a transition point. But there wouldn't be one, would there? Yesterday he remembered all his life as Sam and today it is all a muddle of when and where and who. Anyway, as Sam has pointed out, there are parts of it he doesn't remember at all.

"He wasn't going to kill you," Sam says. They are hyperventilating side by side. "That was the deal he made with Dad. He banged your head against the wall so hard it broke through the wallboard, and he said _You know that won't kill him._ He had you by the ankle and held you upside down and _shook_ you, like he was trying to get the change out of your pockets. Like you were a ketchup jar and he wanted something to go with his fries. He banged you against the wall and I heard your leg snap and you cried out and he shook you _again_ and I knew it wouldn't kill you."

Jo's knees fail on her too, and she sits suddenly on the floor. She is in Dean's line of vision, slumping, ashen. She looks like she is about to scream.

Sam can't stop now. His voice cracks up and he soldiers on anyway, hands still by his sides like they don't belong to him. "Shani -- I guess you don't remember her. We were talking to her mom. She was the first special we found without any visions, you know? The first one we didn't get led by the nose to. I guess he was jealous or something. He took over her mom."

"He wouldn't kill me," Dean repeats, low.

"He didn't need to." Sam suddenly leans forward so his face is in his knees and wraps his arms around his head, as if someone were attacking him that moment. Dean is not even conscious of his hand coming up to rest on Sam's back until it is there. "I would have done _anything_ , man. Anything. He had me against the wall and you cried out just like before and if he'd asked me to be his right hand man in evil, I would have said yes. I want to say I was playing him to give you time to recover, but the truth is I would have said yes. If Shani hadn't come home and fought him, I would have gone over to him just to spare you."

The hand on Sam's back curls into a fist. Dean can feel the upsurge of ferocity. "Don't you fucking dare, Sammy," he says, and that feels real, familiar. "Don't you fucking dare."

"You were always gonna be there," Sam sniffles. "I was never gonna be able to convince you to stay away. You were never gonna stop trying to save me." He pauses. Dean feels the tremors that run through his back, and then they disappear and Sam says, "So I _made_ you stop."

Dean feels himself turning to stone where he sits. Jo pushes up into his space, pressing her hip in between his knees till his legs come apart and she is against him, grabbing his body, talking into his cold ear. "I'm sorry," she babbles, whispering, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't know." The hand that is not a fist on Sam's back comes automatically around her body. That is what a husband is supposed to do for his wife. She drips hot tears on his neck and his cheeks are cold slabs of meat and his chest heaves and his head spins, like he wants to run away but he doesn't know where to.

Sam is out from under Dean's fist and across the room, looking out the back window, wiping snot on his sleeve. He says, "I made you into Sam because it's not Sam's job to sacrifice himself for the family. That's Dean's job. And I've been out hunting for two years and I killed the demon with the yellow eyes and I -- finished the job."

Dean finds his limbs stiff but unstable, as if he's been frozen in place for hours, waiting out a predator. He flexes his left hand two or three times while with his right he disentangles himself from Jo. He stands up slowly and leaves her behind on the couch. Deep breaths do not warm his body and he stands there paralyzed, waiting for Sam to turn around so he can hit him or shout at him or do something. Sam does not turn around.

"Jo only knew a little about it," he says, dull, like a tape player running out of battery. "It was that or leave you with strangers. She was just supposed to play along, just till you were off crutches, and then I thought you'd go back to college."

Behind him, Dean can hear Jo crying, not the big theatrical kind, just a little leaky. "I knew who you really were," she says. "I never thought you were him. I knew who you were." She chokes in a breath and tries to say something else, and then gives up and just cries. Dean can't go and comfort her.

"Dad had a secret," Sam says softly. He runs a finger over the window frame, chalk dust sticking to his skin, and turns suddenly to face Dean. He is very close, radiating body heat. His face is sharp, pugnacious, itching for a fight. Sam looms in, using his bulk as a weapon in a way he never did before, and makes Dean bend his neck back to maintain eye contact. Sam says, "Dean would have to save Sammy or kill him. Well, Sammy got saved: I hid him in your body. Nobody ever found him there. Dean is the one did the saving: I took your name, and your car, and your goddamn silver ring," he rips at it on his finger, but it won't come off, just jams against the knuckle till Sam draws blood, "and your crazy reckless personality. When the history books are written -- not that they ever will be -- they'll say that Dean Winchester rounded up fourteen luck-children and went out and hunted down that demon and killed him."

Watching him rant is sort of -- a familiar pattern. Dean has waited through Sam's anxious, self-important speeches before. He lets Sam peter out and blurts the first thing that is on his tongue: "So, d'you want, like, a parade?" And sarcasm is warming, a comfort, another old part of him falling back into place. "You want a brass band? Congratulations, man, you saved the world." Sam is hiding his face, turning away, pacing out the confines of the room as if this is _his_ house, as if he has a right to be here. Dean hardens his voice against that presumption.

"What do you want out of me, thanks? Thank you for trying to squash me into your idea of a life, thank you for scrambling my brains like you're shaking up a can of whipped cream, thank you for making me a paranoid freak, thank you for making it so every time I say hello to my wife, my _wife_ \--" and he points one hard finger at Jo on the couch and she is sitting there pleading with her dark eyes, not saying a word, "--I'm lying to her, and she's lying back to me because she knew it all along --"

Sam doesn't deny a word. He just paces across the end of the room, waiting, waiting.

"-- And finally you get around to wandering back here, and you don't even have the grace to leave me like this, you undo it all so I'll _know_ I got fucked? Where is your head at, Sammy?" He ends in a roar. He does not even realize he has been raising his voice till the walls echo the last word back to him.

In the abrupt silence, a high-pitched cry breaks out in the next room. Betty, of course. Dean stomps out of the living room and ignores Jo at his heels and scoops the baby up into his arms. She has just begun to discover favoritism, and wants Daddy all the time. Dean tries not to use that against Jo, when they are fighting. Betty is only half-awake, startled by his shouting more than anything else, and wails a couple of times into his neck before quieting. Jo has her hand on Betty's back, soothing her with some kind of low phrases, while Dean wraps himself around the baby and absorbs the warmth of her sweaty body. Sam is in the doorway.

Sam is in the doorway to their bedroom, his and Jo's, staring poleaxed at Betty like he had no idea she exists. Dean rotates so his body is in between the doorway and the baby. He has never defended himself against his brother like this before. He has never needed to, before.


	24. Freebird

Sam woke up in the dark in a room he did not know. There was something touching his face. He lay desperately still, thinking backwards, and finally came to the memory of bunking down in Dean and Jo's living room, on their cheap couch. His feet hung off the end. There was something touching his face.

That thing moved gently over his cheek and to his temple, then up to his forehead to trace the lines there. Sam felt the shadow of something hovering above his eye. The pressure on his skin traced down his nose and tickled each of his moles and found the lines next to his mouth. He waited, eyes closed, and after a minute the sensation withdrew. Only then was it safe to look.

Dean was sitting on the floor next to him, of course. He had pulled his hand back far enough that he could lie and say he was just going to shake his brother awake. Sam didn't make him lie, just lay there and looked him over. They looked each other over. It was a long silence.

"Where you been, man?" Dean whispered. Sam had been answering questions all evening long, dully or angrily or with halting guilt, and asking his fair share too, but that one hadn't come up yet.

"Everywhere. I saw New York City. I got beat up in Montana. I saved -- you remember Ava? -- I found her and we saved her. I gave her back her engagement ring." Betty was crawling on the floor by Dean's scarred knee, grasping at his clothes as she practiced standing up by herself. She blabbed to her father, random words and noises. "Where have _you_ been?"

Dean hung his head, like he didn't want to answer. His face was mobile, like a flight of birds changing direction all together. He'd grown older in the time Sam had been away. "Here, for the last year and a half. I got a job. I was gonna finish college for you, but Betty kind of scuttled that plan. I have legit credit cards, that I pay every month. Man, I pay _taxes_. I got all the normal you ever wanted."

Betty clapped a hand against her father's shoulder and laughed as Dean curled a hand around her automatically. Sam stared at her, at the row of teeth gleaming in her jaw as she smiled, at the wisps of curling ash blonde on her head. Sam realized after a moment that he had never seen photos of Dean from when he had been a baby. Probably they had all been destroyed in the fire, or left behind, like a million other things. Sam asked, "Do you want it?"

"You can't have her," Dean said instantly, and did that thing again that he had done earlier, twisting his body away as if to shield Betty from violence.

Raising himself up on one elbow, Sam put out a placating hand. "That's not -- she's your daughter for crying out loud, Dean. I would never --"

Dean lowered his head till his chin was resting on the crown of Betty's head. His breath was fast, his voice implacable like a heavy engine. "There are a lot of things I didn't think you would do."

And that was -- well, it was true. Sam did not deny it, and Dean did not pursue it; it just hung in the room between them like a clothesline or a leash. Sam sat up, tossing the blanket off himself. He put his feet down on the floor and it was cold, Dean was sitting there on the cold floor like he didn't notice it. Sam pulled the blanket back up and wrapped it around Dean's shoulders, so it encompassed him and Betty both. "There's something I don't think you understand," Sam said at last. "I'm not like you. I can't just handle any situation that comes my way. I'm weak, and you're not."

Dean stirred, as if to protest, and Sam talked over him: "I know I am. When it all came down, when we gathered to summon him and kill him dead at last, I fell apart. That's why he picked us, I think -- why I was the special one and you weren't. I was vulnerable. But, at the end, when that demon was looking into me and trying to find my weakness, you know what he found instead? He found that part of you I'd borrowed, and the Dean in me pulled me together and I could fight. And because I could do it, all the other specials around me followed my lead and we won. We won, Dean. You and me both."

No response from Dean: he sat there with his head hung low, shoulders tense. Sam stared at the back of his neck.

"I knew it was a shitty thing to do and I did it anyway. I didn't realize you'd get the visions, and stuff. But you were lying there unconscious in the hospital, and he could have broken your neck, Dean. He could have peeled you like a grape and if it didn't kill you he could keep getting his jollies as long as he liked. I was looking ahead at all the things he could do to you, and I just. I couldn't take it." Sam shuddered and crossed his arms. "I couldn't go to ground; you'd just come after me. I couldn't argue you out of trying to protect me. At least this way, when I left, I left a little bit of myself behind for you."

Betty was quiet in Dean's arms, her ear against his chest. With his head down and his eyes screwed shut, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking or what he would do next. Sam sat on the couch and let the midnight quiet settle in the room and after a minute or two he could just hear the noise of Dean's tears: the hitching breaths, a sniffle here and there. He would never admit to it outright, so Sam just rested his palm on the back of Dean's neck and let him cry by himself, sitting on the floor in his underwear, while Betty twined her fat fingers in the thong of his pendant. She was slowly falling back to sleep to the rhythm of her father's unvoiced sobbing.

"Go back to bed." Sam said, after it seemed like the worst of it was over. He squeezed Dean's neck, nudged him on the shoulder. "It's too confusing to talk about now."

Dean gave the biggest snort in the world, inhaling gallons of snot. "Will you be here in the morning?" he asked, wiping his face with one hand. He put no inflection into the question, as if he only wanted to plan ahead, whatever the answer would be.

Sam found himself shy, afraid. "If you want," he said slowly. "If you'll let me stay."

"Don't go yet," Dean said, his back to Sam.

Sam said: "I won't. I'll stay. I'll do whatever you want."

***

Dean wakes up about six, a good half-hour before dawn. He is wrapped around a warm body. He is wrapped around his wife, the woman who has been calling him the wrong name for two and a half years on purpose. The second he becomes conscious of who she is, he tenses, and realizes Jo has been lying there awake and tense just like him.

"Morning," he mumbles. He lifts his head for a look at the crib, but Betty is playing by herself, whapping something floppy against her own noggin. "She's good for a little while yet."

Bodies talk one way, while their owners are thinking another. He's hard against her warm butt and she has an ankle hooked around his calf. She reaches out carefully and takes up his hand from where it has been resting on her waist, and laces her fingers into it.

Dean has rough hands, from the work and the industrial soap. She hates his hands. Her skin is two or three shades paler than his own. He smells her hair and watches her look at their fingers and slowly becomes conscious of the fact that someone is frying bacon. Someone is in the kitchen, frying bacon -- Sam.

"You want breakfast?" Dean asks, and starts to unpeel himself from their close formation.

"Don't go -- don't go," Jo whispers, like it's too shameful to say out loud. She tugs on his hand as he is sitting up, finds his other hand and grabs that too. She rolls and is lying on her back beside him, watching as she draws her knees apart. She is flushed and with her hair in disarray. She pulls one of his hands down and rests it on a breast, horrible longing on her face.

The easy thing would be to fall into her, do what she wants, smooth over the gaping difference between yesterday and today with some nooky and pretend like they can go on as they have been. They have always used sex to fix an argument; that's how they got Betty after all; and Sam in the kitchen has plenty of experience at selective deafness. Dean looks at her chin wobbling, and the easy thing yanks at him hard. He turns over and crawls up her body, resting his hips on hers and pressing their foreheads together. She can tell he wants her; she _is_ a beautiful woman in her underwear, after all. He kisses her and she is starving for it, her tongue in his mouth like the first time, back when he couldn't walk unaided and she had ashes in her hair. He pushes stray locks off her forehead. She's got one hand down the back of his boxers.

He pulls back and she has her teeth in his lower lip so he has to lift his head for her to let it go. He just looks at her for a long time, and she is looking back at him so desperately naked. "Hi," he tells her. "My name's Dean. What's yours?"

That Look comes over her face: confusion, pity, fear. "Jo," she chokes out. "I'm your wife."

Dean breathes out through his nose and watches the tiny hairs on her cheek stir. "You're not married to some guy named Sam?"

"No," she gulps, and draws him in close with her elbows around his ribs. She mashes their bodies together so he can feel her chest like a bellows. She kisses his neck, his pulse, his collarbone. "I'm married to you, you idiot."

Dean does not know what to say to that. He sweeps his hand across her forehead again, gold band through her golden hair. They lie together like that, not moving, for a little while. Her thighs press against his flanks and she toes the back of one of his knees.

"Okay," he says. He smells her hair, and he smells coffee. "Sam's gonna eat all the bacon."

"Let him," Jo whispers, and clutches tighter.

"I like bacon," he protests, and flexes muscle against her. He lifts them both up, till they're sitting together, still close. He likes the feel of her forehead against his temple. She definitely likes it, making that unbelievably hot noise in her throat that she does.

He feels her inhale sharply against him, and he turns to see what it is: Betty is standing in her crib, offering them the thing she has been playing with. It is a triangular slice of buttered toast. Her hair is a tangle of lint and melted butter. "Oh, man, you did _not_!" Dean calls, and Sam asks from the other room,

"What? Don't you eat breakfast any more?"

This is finally enough to get both parents out of bed and moving. Jo drags on a pair of sweat pants while Dean confiscates the toast. They bump into each other, crossing the room at the end of the bed, and she pinches him, playful, on the waist.

"Take this messy child of yours," he humphs, and hands over Betty. "This crap is everywhere. Where are the baby wipes?"

Jo rests the baby on her hip and moistens a washcloth in the bathroom. Dean crosses his arms, pretending to himself that he's cold, and then in a rush he steps out of the bedroom.

Sam is standing at the stove, frying bacon, of course. He is wearing ragged jeans and a shirt that needs washing and no shoes, and he still looks vaguely naked without any hair like that. While Dean stands there, Sam raises his head and they see each other, both alive and only ten feet apart. They are practically in the same room.

"Hey," says Sam, tentatively. "Does Jo like it extra crispy too?"

Dean clears his throat and finds his voice. "Yeah." Desperate for a joke, he retreats to the bedroom and takes up the triangle of toast. He brandishes it at Sam, and thinks about smacking him with it, while Sam smiles sheepishly.

"She was awake, man. I figured, better to keep her happy and let you all sleep."

There is a certain misguided logic in that, so Dean just tosses the toast into the sink, and pulls eggs out of the fridge.

Sam stands there like an oak tree, big and awkward. He tells the pan, "She really is in love with you. She has been for years. I didn't think you'd --"

He stops. Dean is not ready to think. He finds something for his hands to do, and pours himself some of the coffee Sam has made.

"If you want to yell at me, that would be good." Sam clears his throat and rearranges strips of bacon in the pan. "It was a pretty awful thing to do."

Dean is not ready to think. Jo trundles in, Betty grasping her hands and taking heavy thumping toe-steps.

It's sort of like being stabbed in the chest with it, or like he's suddenly transported back to the day Betty was born. He can hardly breathe at the idea of that little girl belonging to him, being his responsibility. He sets down his coffee before he shakes it all out of the mug and holds out his hands for her to walk to. Jo has the oddest look on her face as she lets go of Betty and lets her pace shakily across the kitchen floor. The sun is low in the sky still, and the whole room is orange with it, the little girl fat and robust and stomping her way into the safe circle of her father's arms. He sweeps her up into the sky and she shrieks laughter.

Sam has pulled the pan off the heat and is watching. Dean can feel him watching, his desperation for everything to be all right after all. It is easy to pretend everything is all right. Jo is right there, expectant, full of hope. He shudders and closes his eyes, while Betty laughs and laughs and bangs him on the head with her meaty paws.

"S-- Dean, if you don't want to be married to me," Jo says slowly. "I mean, say so."

The sound of early traffic outside, the last crackles of the hot bacon in the pan. Dean opens his eyes. "I don't know," he says, and that is the truth so he says it twice: "I don't know." The silence that ensues is heavy, scary. Dean fills it up with the everyday stuff: "So how was the couch?"

"You need a new one," Sam says, and puts his back to the room again. He cracks eggs into the pan and they sizzle, yolks swimming. "The one you have smells like somebody puked in it, and it isn't long enough to fit me."

"You think you're gonna be sleeping on it a while?"

Sam stands there, tongue-tied. "I --"

Dean is tongue-tied too. "Cause. You could. For a while. If you wanted."

"Yeah," Sam says. He tends the eggs. Dean drinks his coffee and pours a cup for Jo and Betty starts wiggling in his arm, wanting to get down.

"I was thinking," Dean says suddenly, like the thought will skitter away from him if he doesn't get it out of his mouth fast enough. "About the hunting thing."

Jo tenses up, waiting for him to look at her. There's something hard in his chest, restrictive like tape on broken ribs. He puts the baby down to crawl around on the floor. But she likes walking, and she takes several awkward steps towards her mother before bouncing down on her behind.

He doesn't know what everyone expects him to say. "I liked hunting," he says, mostly to himself, to hear it and find out whether it still fits. "I was good at it. It was -- cool."

"You want to try it again?" Jo asks, and it's not with that passive expectation, but a challenge, a dare, the excitement of it in a colleague.

They all stay still for a minute in the sunny kitchen, just letting that challenge hang in the air between them. Sam is at the stove and Dean beside him and Jo in the chair and the baby on the floor. Sam is biting his lip, like he's thinking about crying again, because this household hasn't had enough of the freaking waterworks over the past day.

"Sure," Dean says at last, like he does it all the time, like she's just asked him whether she should pick up a sixpack on the way home. "I could do that."

"Only if you want to," warns Sam, high-strung as always.

Dean snatches a strip of bacon out of the pan, and stuffs it in his mouth. Jo cracks up, choking on her coffee. "You think you can make me do anything I don't want to?" he asks, with his mouth full.

"No," Sam laughs, and even though it's a lie it sounds pretty good. "No I don't think I can."

"Damn straight," says Dean, and goes to put some pants on.


End file.
